I don’t often sleep while my husband is driving. It seems mean to flop into the bunk when I know he’s ten times tireder than me, but sometimes I just need a nap. It’s always interesting to see where we’ve landed when I crawl out of the bunk.
I usually wake up tangled in the cargo net, dreaming I’m a giant tuna on my way to certain death. That’s if I can fall asleep at all, sometimes the roads are just too bumpy to drift off. It’s nice sleeping in an idling truck, but not so nice trying to sleep while you’re being bounced around like a lotto ball.
I’d had an especially hard time sleeping one night in South Carolina, mostly because we had a reefer next to us that was built in 1908 and apparently ran on warthog power. It squealed and walloped all night long, making more than fifteen minutes of sleep impossible for me. I was just a little cranky the next day, and my husband sent me to the bunk for a nap.
When I woke up, I was disoriented (like I always am when I wake up tangled in a giant tuna net). My husband wasn’t in the truck, and I knew we were backed into a dock because I could see the yard dogs zooming around. I got out of the bunk and stumbled over to the window to get a look at where we were about the time my husband got back into the truck.
“Well hello, sleeping beauty.”
“Where in the unnatural hell are we? Are those garden gnomes?”
“Indeed they are. Every shape, size and color imaginable.”
