Dozing at the wheel the other night, I started thinking about the strangest places I have ever chosen to sleep (I am not talking geographic locations here but physical places so “Yuma, Arizona,” wouldn’t work.
I have slept in bathtubs, on porch swings, picnic tables in Burma and on a platform floating in the swimming portion of a lake (you know one of those things you swim out to), but probably the strangest was in the overhead luggage compartment on what had been the Orient Express as it went through Yugoslavia. When the conductor came in to collect tickets he was a bit surprised.
I slept on Army road marches. Ok, maybe “slept” is not the right word, but I disengaged from the world and went into some sort of “auto-march” mode. Upon reaching our destination I swear I didn’t remember half of the march.
I was also known for falling asleep in the back of the deuce-and-a-halfs and/or 5-tons; even when crossing the Iraqi desert. Oh, we’d get slammed around something awful, but I could sleep through it!
I’ve slept in lots of really strange places - I was homeless for a while, and I’ve travelled a lot - but probably the most unusual was on top of Hans Christian Anderson’s grave in Copenhagen.
Slayer concert. Yes, a Slayer concert. I had spent the whole day working and then went from work to the concert. I was exhausted by the time Slayer got on. I went and grabbed a seat and dozed for a couple of songs.
The “trunk” of my Camaro. Okay so theres no trunk, but I still call the storage space in the back the trunk. I was really drunk and had a bunch of drunken friends crashing in my room. I didn’t want to fight for space so I went in the garage and crawled in there.
Movie theatre, when I went to go watch Lord of the Rings. I knew I shouldn’t have gone because I was tired to begin with and I knew a long movie plus cool temperature would put me to sleep. It did.
On a hill in the park down the block from my house. A friend and I had spent the whole night up, when dawn came we walked around town for a while and then crashed at the park. Its a really weird feeling to wake up at a park and try and remember what you were doing there.
Oh and one more…
I used to deliver newpapers to businesses around town at 2 in the morning. I was ALWAYS tired when I went to work. I picked up my papers at the pressroom, which was a large warehouse with a big loud press machine in it. I used to take little naps on pallets while I waited for the papers to be done.
Inside the center wing section of a DC-8. It had been a loooong night. Although, I don’t think it could technically be defined as sleeping. It was more like “passing out.”
One time a couple of years ago, it was Chrtistmas Eve and i was at midnight mass… i was feeling a bit sleepy so I lay down on one of the pews and slept through the whole service. It wasn’t very comfortable, but thankfully (in the X-mas spirit) I had a Santa hat which i used as a pillow.
There have been a number of them.
The two weirdest that come to mind are:
On the back of a Honda 90 motorcycle on Highway 1 just north of Big Sur. We were coming up from Cayucas to Monterey. It had been about a 2 hour ride up to that point. We suddenly got blasted by a huge gust of wind which blew us off the road onto the dirt shoulder. I almost fell off backwards and will never forget the wide-eyed look of horror on the people in the car behind us. :eek: Luckily we were northbound so were blown off the road instead of into oncoming traffic. I was wide awake instantly and stayed that way the rest of the ride home.
Leaning against the stage at a Led Zeppelin concert at the Spectrum in Philly in '72 or so. I don’t remember the specifics leading up to falling asleep there, but it really amused my younger brother who I took to his first concert.
Inboard of the port engine on the wing of a B-26 (IIRC - a twin-engine medium bomber, anyway) on a pedestal in a park in San Angelo, Texas. I had arrived in town with a friend for a five night gig and we didn’t know where the band’s motel was. He slept inboard of the starboard engine.
Various trees, bushes and abandoned buildings.
At a florist’s shop where I worked as a delivery driver, we had a space made in between boxes of supplies that allowed you to squeeze in and you would be supported as you snoozed standing up.
My sister used to sleep on the rear ‘dash board’ (I don’t know what it’s called but it’s the flat surface under the rear window) on long road trips when she was 4 or 5. This was before child seats were mandatory - actually it was probabaly before child seats exested. Also the rear ‘dash’ was bigger back then.
For three weeks in December 98 and January 99, I traveled throughout Sweden - Stockholm, Oskarshamn, Örebro, Linköping, Lund, Malmö; I was all over the place. However, for the last half of my trip, I was jetlagged something fierce. No matter where I went, no matter whom I was with, I wanted to sleep and would take advantage of any opportunity to do so.
During one party I was determined to sleep, but there was no open bed, couch, or chair, and floorspace was at a premium. I improvised.
That’s one of the many pictures of me sleeping that were taken by my friends to commemorate that trip. “What’d you do in Sweden?” “I slept for twenty minutes at a time whenever I could.”
While I couldn’t fall asleep on the AMC flight that took me over there, I did konk out the next morning in the turret of an uparmored Humvee on an EOD sweep in Kuwait. No, I’m not EOD yet, but we were doing a quick look at what I wanted to survey. Preemptive UXO sweep.
“Yep, no UXOs here!” Yet the detailed sweep found submunitions where I waltzed through. I walked through a minefield and lived.
Tripler
Maybe I should have stayed awake. . . :eek:
Well, let’s see, weird places I have fallen asleep:
Not so much a place as a position…as a kid, I tied a rope to my ankle, then to the bedpost, then jumped off the opposite side of the bed. I landed on the floor on my face and couldn’t really get up to untie myself, so I just fell asleep as I lay. There are pictures to prove this.
At a ska concert. And anyone who’s ever been to a ska concert knows that they can get pretty loud. I had been up a lot that week studying and doing homework and what not, and when the concert came on Saturday I made the mistake of sitting in a comfy chair (the concert was in the student union.)
On a hotel bed mattress that had been pulled off the box spring and wedged into that tiny hallway that goes from the door to the room. The hallway was so narrow that the mattress was in a nice ‘U’ shape…as was I. Basically, it was four guts sharing a room with two beds. Obviously, none of us could willingly sleep in the same bed as another guy and call ourselves heterosexual males (this was in high school at the time, so this was a very important issue.) Well, one guy volunteered to sleep on the floor, so another got the bed. Neither me or the guy left wanted to sleep on the floor, so we improvised. He got the box spring, and I got the mattress on the floor. I think I got the shaft in that deal.
In the closet of the Marriott hotel in Chicago. I was coming back from a camping trip in New Mexico (on may way to VT) Well, the train in New Mexico was very late, and got later all the time. When we arrived in Chicago, the train to New York had left, so Amtrak put up all the passengers that had missed trains in the Marriott (very nice of them.) Well, again myself and three other guys shared a room meant for two. Remembering my previous experiences, and seeing that for two and a half weeks until then I had been sleeping in the ground or in a train seat, I said that I was happy with the floor. The problem? Not much floor space after we had put our bags down and such. So I went in the closet. It was about two and a half feet deep and a little over six feet long, so it was prefect for me.
But I think the weirdest place is the last one:
In a canoe. Yup, during a white-water canoeing trip I fell asleep in a canoe. How, you ask? Well, we had gotten to a part of the river that was not white water. In fact, it was very slow moving, and seeing as we were ahead of schedule, and kind of tired, we took it easy on the paddling. A little too easy, apparently. Due to the fact that we had an odd number of people, I was the only guy in a middle seat and did even less paddling than the front and back guy. Well, I eventually just nodded off in the canoe…while kneeling. When I woke up I had very sore knees and legs.
Lying on a blanket about 10’ off I-695 during morning rush hour after my car broke down and while waiting for my dad to come get me. I had been working all night.
