I was yesterday, too, but I didn't write last night. The drive here was nightmarishly long. With no traffic, I believe the estimated driving time is 1.5 hours. It took twice that long. Keep in mind, most of the drive is on a 70 mile per hour highway, so that means our average speed was 35 mph on a HIGHWAY.
Of course, that wasn't our real speed ever. (That'd be tolerable.) We just alternated between going 70 mph (the speed we should have been going) and being at dead-stop-and-go traffic speeds, effectively moving at what was essentially 0 mph. (Not quite that bad, but close enough.)
I slept over half of the way, but discomfort built up, leaving me miserable because no amount of body shifting could save my slowly-breaking body. (I am not built for long-distance travel. Anything longer than an hour starts to get uncomfortable for me.)
Once there, we set our tent up, believing that when we finished, we have five minutes before pre-rounds (the most challenging part of the entire weekend) were to start.
...We arrived to find them over. This, due to a disparity of half an hour between the listed schedule and the actual schedule. Later, after the dance, I asked my sister when it was dark: "Had you known, would you have preferred going to pre-rounds and setting the tent up in the dark?" She wasn't actually sure.
Me, personally, on the other hand...well, given the difficulties we faced, setting the tent up with light was a smart move. We didn't pack a hammer to nail the tent pegs in so had to scrounge around for a rock to use for that purpose. (It wasn't a good rock, even.) We also had some difficulties properly threading the backbone support things through the tent to get it to actually be a tent.
Another highlight of that evening: after the dance, we were invited to an afterparty. We tried to find where (we were given directions they said would make it impossible to miss! That we would definitely know it when we saw it that we were there!) for forty minutes.
They key operative word being TRIED. After doing as much searching as we were comfortable doing without potentially trespassing and/or getting lost (Circle 8--the place we are at--is HUGE, with many forking paths that go miles into nowhere; it's a labyrinth), we gave up and went to bed.
I was told by my sister to cover my feet up. Confused, I hesitated until she explained, "They reek." She ultimately slept well.
I...did not.
I suspect multiple factors. She can't sleep with lights; I don't sleep well without one. It being dark with no street lights, advantage to her.
She used three sleeping bags to stay warm. I thought a small sleeping bag to be my blanket on top of a larger sleeping bag as my bed, plus one of my two heavier coats unzipped would be plenty--not unjustifiably so, mind you. At 10:40 pm, it was temperate and I was even a little over-dressed with said heavier coat unzipped. I figured it'd only get a little colder, so I'd either zip up my jacket or put on my heavier jacket with both unzipped.
...I was wrong.
Oh so VERY wrong.
After zipping up one, putting the other on, and zipping it up, I STILL needed a little extra. Then, there was expectation versus reality. Expectation: Roll onto my left side (the side I always sleep on), and I'd sleep there the whole night. Reality: sleeping on hard ground meant that didn't happen.
I THOUGHT that me picking one of the thickest two sleeping bags as a bed would be sufficient. It was not. The thought of doubling its thickness by folding it in half never occurred to me (I was sleepy, to be fair). Though, I'm not sure that'd have helped.
So what I ended up doing: Invoking some dream logic.
Which, oddly enough.
I was lucid enough to KNOW was dream logic.
And yet all the same it worked well enough.
It involved some sort of "stack the layers" reasoning. I have no clue what that means (other than that exact phrase was used), but my subconscious weaved an intricate web of dreams, shifting between them as my body moved. (I believe there were some actual visual layers used in the dreamscape, think gigantic Inception-like scenes, woven over thick floors and thick floors. Like, think placing one mattress over another.)
Whatever it was, it kept me warm and relatively comforted, when I combined this layer-dream-thing with a real-life move: what I dubbed the "Continuous Barrel Roll". To combat the hardness and attempt to keep me warm, I continued rolling, in a circle with no travel, pulling half of my sleeping bag bed over me. I never moved towards my sister, I never clashed with the tent wall, but I know I kept rolling and rolling and rolling, as if going down a hill, in a continuous circular motion.
It wasn't perfect, but it got me through the night.
Of course, that wasn't our real speed ever. (That'd be tolerable.) We just alternated between going 70 mph (the speed we should have been going) and being at dead-stop-and-go traffic speeds, effectively moving at what was essentially 0 mph. (Not quite that bad, but close enough.)
I slept over half of the way, but discomfort built up, leaving me miserable because no amount of body shifting could save my slowly-breaking body. (I am not built for long-distance travel. Anything longer than an hour starts to get uncomfortable for me.)
Once there, we set our tent up, believing that when we finished, we have five minutes before pre-rounds (the most challenging part of the entire weekend) were to start.
...We arrived to find them over. This, due to a disparity of half an hour between the listed schedule and the actual schedule. Later, after the dance, I asked my sister when it was dark: "Had you known, would you have preferred going to pre-rounds and setting the tent up in the dark?" She wasn't actually sure.
Me, personally, on the other hand...well, given the difficulties we faced, setting the tent up with light was a smart move. We didn't pack a hammer to nail the tent pegs in so had to scrounge around for a rock to use for that purpose. (It wasn't a good rock, even.) We also had some difficulties properly threading the backbone support things through the tent to get it to actually be a tent.
Another highlight of that evening: after the dance, we were invited to an afterparty. We tried to find where (we were given directions they said would make it impossible to miss! That we would definitely know it when we saw it that we were there!) for forty minutes.
They key operative word being TRIED. After doing as much searching as we were comfortable doing without potentially trespassing and/or getting lost (Circle 8--the place we are at--is HUGE, with many forking paths that go miles into nowhere; it's a labyrinth), we gave up and went to bed.
I was told by my sister to cover my feet up. Confused, I hesitated until she explained, "They reek." She ultimately slept well.
I...did not.
I suspect multiple factors. She can't sleep with lights; I don't sleep well without one. It being dark with no street lights, advantage to her.
She used three sleeping bags to stay warm. I thought a small sleeping bag to be my blanket on top of a larger sleeping bag as my bed, plus one of my two heavier coats unzipped would be plenty--not unjustifiably so, mind you. At 10:40 pm, it was temperate and I was even a little over-dressed with said heavier coat unzipped. I figured it'd only get a little colder, so I'd either zip up my jacket or put on my heavier jacket with both unzipped.
...I was wrong.
Oh so VERY wrong.
After zipping up one, putting the other on, and zipping it up, I STILL needed a little extra. Then, there was expectation versus reality. Expectation: Roll onto my left side (the side I always sleep on), and I'd sleep there the whole night. Reality: sleeping on hard ground meant that didn't happen.
I THOUGHT that me picking one of the thickest two sleeping bags as a bed would be sufficient. It was not. The thought of doubling its thickness by folding it in half never occurred to me (I was sleepy, to be fair). Though, I'm not sure that'd have helped.
So what I ended up doing: Invoking some dream logic.
Which, oddly enough.
I was lucid enough to KNOW was dream logic.
And yet all the same it worked well enough.
It involved some sort of "stack the layers" reasoning. I have no clue what that means (other than that exact phrase was used), but my subconscious weaved an intricate web of dreams, shifting between them as my body moved. (I believe there were some actual visual layers used in the dreamscape, think gigantic Inception-like scenes, woven over thick floors and thick floors. Like, think placing one mattress over another.)
Whatever it was, it kept me warm and relatively comforted, when I combined this layer-dream-thing with a real-life move: what I dubbed the "Continuous Barrel Roll". To combat the hardness and attempt to keep me warm, I continued rolling, in a circle with no travel, pulling half of my sleeping bag bed over me. I never moved towards my sister, I never clashed with the tent wall, but I know I kept rolling and rolling and rolling, as if going down a hill, in a continuous circular motion.
It wasn't perfect, but it got me through the night.
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