Endless Days...And Nights

Sleeping in the little tent trailer is an art. There are enough beds to sleep at least seven very close friends. Mr. Zee, Auntie Bucksnort, the three dogs and I only make six, so there should be plenty of room--especially if the dogs acted like dogs and slept on the floor. Not our little doggy pirate band!

Bucksnort, for reasons best not enumerated here, got the two double beds to herself. The queen-sized bed (sounds spacious, doesn't it?) ended up with the other five of us rolling around and competing for sleeping space. Captain Emma likes the lookout position, which just happens to be the place where my feet would go, if they were ever allowed to assume a natural position. Little Weets likes to be right in the middle, under the covers. When disturbed, she lets the world know why one of her nicknames is Tiny Cujo. Her bared-teeth snarling sounds reduce us all to helpless giggles but no one has ever dared to touch her when she is doing her Cujo thing. Leny, the biggest of the pirates, prefers the inside edge of the bed, and Mr. Zee is quite happy on the window side. The problem is that the two of them sleep like wonky parentheses, forming this shape: ) (. My spot would be in the middle of those.

You will notice that the available space in between the wrong-facing parentheses is shaped like an hourglass. Now, if you have read this far (and I can't imagine why you would have done so) and if you know me at all, you will have to acknowledge that my shape is anything but an hourglass and never has been. Just keep that in mind when picturing our night under the stars.

In retrospect, I'd have to recommend against any kind of camping just two weeks after knee replacement surgery. I've been making a wonderful recovery, but night time is the most difficult because it is so hard to find a comfortable position. So there I was, shifting carefully in my allotted hourglass space, trying to position a pillow under the bad knee, then finding that I needed to do it all over again after fifteen minutes or so.

And then the snoring started.

Leny snores in what can best be described as harmonics. I hope that I am using the term correctly. What I mean is that she harmonizes with herself, kind of snoring in multiple voices, as it were. Then Mr. Zee would begin with a little counterpoint from the other side and both of them would gain in volume until I was shaking with laughter. And get this--every time I raised up my head to peer across to Bucksnort's quarters, no matter what the time of night, her eyes were wide open, which made me laugh even harder.

At some point I must have finally dozed off, only to waken at the earliest light to find Leny's tail section on my pillow (the one where my head was, not the knee pillow) and my head firmly clenched in Mr. Zee's armpit, which frightened us all very badly.

Next: The pretty parts of the trip