3/5 Layton, UT 0 miles
To see the entire road trip visit www.tanstaaflpress.com/tgrt/
If I was a poet, I think it would have been entitled from bad to verse. So I bedded down at a truck stop only to find that I couldn’t sleep. I’d wake up every couple of dozen seconds hacking a lung up needing to blow my nose or both.
By my reckoning my sleep consisted of one stretch of 30 minutes and two stretches of about 15 minutes. At which time the sun peeked out and let me know I needed to start the day. Not only that I had to be bright eyed and bushy tailed for my customers – all when I felt at best like cold SOS on stale bread. I think (eventhough I’ve never experienced one for real) it felt like a hangover after a three day bender.
I got into the con in time to battery my lights and get them shining. I scanned the rest of the booths. Only two of us had books and the other gentleman had books tied to his RPG product. So I sat there. Moving hurt. Coughing hurt. Blowing my nose hurt. Not moving hurt. And this was after 1000 mg of pain-killer.
The doors opened and… well, not much. A mini-rush but as always no one stopped to look at books. Can someone tell me why there is a cloaking field over books until noon?
Besides the point, I managed to hang on for about 20 minutes when I realized there was no way I would make it through the 10AM-6PM day. I put up a sign saying I’d be back and went out to my trailer and slept. Actually slept. I managed to get 30 mins, 45 mins, and 60 minutes worth of sleep, in that order. Now I felt at least moderately like a human being. I went back inside at 2PM. Managed to gut out the rest of the afternoon.
When I got out I made the horrible mistake of going to Texas Roadhouse BBQ. Thought it would be a good place to stoke my needy body. Instead I nearly lost everything. Noisiest restaurant… Ever. I don’t deal well with noise in the best of times. This made it worse. Poor service, messed up my order didn’t help. The prime rib was excellent, however.
Escaping that hell, I beat feet to a different truck stop (the one before didn’t really have a place for me to park and I felt uncomfortable where I ended up). This time got a prime spot, and slept for… 4 hours followed by 3 hours. When I can get big blocks of sleep nearing normal, I know I’m close to well or at least well into mending.
This morning I did laundry and took my first truck stop shower… pretty nice here at the Flying J… and other maintenance chores.
My energy lasted today from 10-3 before I really started to run out of steam. But I gutted it out. Made it and am back for some more lovely sleeping.
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