Now I know I said earlier that I would not make blog posts during vacation. Well, it turns out that I actually will make posts; just not any Homestuck posts. It is only the second day of vacation and I already have a pretty interesting story to tell, so I figured it would make a good post topic. I got access to a laptop to write vacation posts, so I guess that’s what I will do whenever I have something interesting to tell.

Vacation Tales

Every two years since 2008, my family has done a vacation to somewhere in Europe. This year, it’s to Germany and Italy (I’m currently in Germany). And as usual, it starts off with a series of airplane flights. It’s usually two flights, a short one and then a long one. But strangely enough, this time it was cheaper to do three flights: a short one, a long one, and another short one.

Among the three flights, the long one, which took seven hours, had something I was really looking forward to: chilling out to watch some movies in an airplane and maybe also sleep for a bit. And I did indeed get to watch movies. First I watched The Martian, then the Peanuts Movie—both movies I had hoped to see—and in between the movies, I spent half an hour trying and failing to sleep for a bit.

Now I don’t usually fall asleep during long trips. I can recall plenty of rides that were six hours or longer—even as short as half an hour—in which my siblings all dozed off at some point but I stayed wide awake. Even among those long rides, in the past few years I only fell asleep in about half of them, and previously I almost never fell asleep in such rides. This time I felt that it was indeed worth getting some sleep in an overnight flight in which I’d skip ahead six time zones. But I simply failed at getting any sleep with the blanket and pillow given.*

* For whatever reason, everyone’s sleep supplies also included, among other things, a pair of socks. I couldn’t figure out for the life of me if those were meant as mittens, or as socks to wear in the off chance your feet get freezing cold because of sandals.

After the flight, I started feeling a bit weird. At first, while getting ready for the final flight, I myself felt normal but my family thought otherwise. When I felt hungry, my dad said it was only because I was tired, which I didn’t understand because normally you yourself feel when you’re tired. My brother pointed out that I kept blurting stupid stuff and talking too loud even when whispering, almost as if I was drunk.

A (not very) Good Afternoon’s Sleep

Eventually, after arriving in one of the houses we would spend time in and being awake for 24 hours straight, at 1 PM in Germany’s time zone, I actually did start feeling tired. I think I was starting to be really annoying, so here’s what happened. Upon my parents’ instruction, I grabbed a pillow, lay down on the carpet, and fell asleep easily wearing nothing but regular clothes. I woke up after an hour of sleep and they told me to go back to sleep, which I did for another hour.

I don’t know how in the world I couldn’t fall asleep in an airplane with comfortable sleeping supplies but immediately fell asleep face down on a carpet with nothing more than a pillow and clothes. I have a hard time even recounting this whole experience because my memory of it is pretty hazy—god, it sounds like I was trying to remember something that happened when I was drunk—but it’s pretty definitely what happened, all thanks to somehow being unable to sleep.

After waking up at 3 PM, which felt like the early morning, at first I didn’t feel good but got better after a few hours. Right now it’s about 9 PM here, and I’ll definitely be able to sleep at a reasonable time tonight and get my sleep schedule back on track. I guess I’ll see for myself what happens on the way back. But for now I’ll point out the following. On previous vacations like this, I had no sleeping problems. When I was younger, I went by fine not sleeping at all in long flights, even overnight ones. I think it might just be because of me getting older. But in any case, I still think this is a pretty interesting story.

Part 2