I had gotten into a terrible habit of staying up until 4 a.m. and sleeping until 2 p.m. this vacation. My mother wasn't the only one who got sick of it fast. I wanted to get back into the habit of waking up at a decent time, too. I felt like the days were much too short for my liking. Truth be told, I'm a night owl. My introverted personality causes me to cling to the comfortable quiet of the nighttime. But there was never anything to do past 10 o'clock. I had a nightly routine of lounging on my couch downstairs and video-chatting my girlfriend and our mutual friend, Pat, until we were ready to pass out for the night. However, after several weeks of the same routine, my girlfriend, Isabelle, and I decided we needed a change. We had to adjust to upcoming 8 a.m. classes somehow.
I tried setting alarms and waking up earlier, but I slept through all of them. I felt I had no other choice than to completely reset my sleep schedule by staying up all night and then all day the following day. Hopefully that would be enough to fall asleep at an early time with ease. Coincidentally, later in the day, I got a text from Isabelle saying she was planning on doing the same thing. Pat was in Keene for the weekend visiting high school friends, so we made a plan to drive the two hours between us to visit him. The time came to think about leaving and Pat insisted that we stay home because he was busy with other friends.
Isabelle still drove to my house. We decided to make other plans. She arrived around 2:15 a.m. and we left my driveway 15 minutes later.
"So where are we going?" I asked.
"I don't know—where is there to go?" she answered.
We tossed around a few ideas. I mentioned the beach, but we decided it would be too cold. She asked about Boston, but I declined, saying that Boston probably wasn't the safest place at 3 a.m. In the end, we decided to head to Isabelle's small family camp two and a half hours away in Vermont. Everything was going according to plan and we were right on schedule. The highways were nice and quiet. We passed a few signs warning travelers about a snowstorm that we were unaware of. We had gotten about an hour away from home when it started snowing lightly.
"I have to stop for gas," Isabelle said, pointing to her meter. We took the nearest exit, drove into town, and pulled up to the gas station. Isabelle swiped her card and squeezed the gas pump only to discover that the gas pumps had been turned off for the night.
"It's alright," she said as we pulled back onto the highway. "We've only got seven miles until the next exit." Just as the words escaped her mouth, there was a ding and the car's gas light blinked to life. The next seven miles were tense, but we pulled off and headed towards Colby Sawyer College. The first gas station we tried was not selling gas either—3:45 a.m. when we pulled up. We drove to another station and tried again, but no luck. The gas station was set to open at 5 o'clock and by then, it was already 4. There wasn't much else we could do but camp out for an hour.
The hour went by pretty fast. We listened to music and talked and laughed at some of our inside jokes. By then it began snowing harder and the town's snowplows had begun to make their rounds. At last it was 5 o'clock. I turned to look towards the store and saw a person's shadow.
"There's someone in there!" I yelled. Isabelle practically sprinted out of the car and over to a very tired-looking old woman. 20 minutes later, we had a tank full of gas and we were back on the highway. We reached our destination at 6:30 am. We used the spare key to open the small cabin door and sat on the small couch, shivering because there was no heat. "I'm kind of hungry," I said.
"Me, too," Isabelle agreed. "We should probably go."
I got to drive on the way home. The sun still wasn't up yet, but the world was starting to look a whole lot lighter. Everything was coated in a thin blanket of snow and reflected the same gray hue of the sky. We reached Lebanon, N.H., around 7 a.m., and Isabelle Googled a diner for breakfast. She read me a description.
"This place looks really good, we should go here."
"OK," I agreed. She read me directions and led me to a sketchy-looking truck stop gas station. "There's no way this is a diner," I said.
"Hold on, let me check," she insisted. She ran inside and returned about two minutes later. "It's a diner, I promise."
We got out of the car and went inside. I saw what I expected: a gas station general store. Isabelle led me to the back to a door and I peered through the glass. It certainly looked like a normal diner.
"This is the sketchiest thing I've ever done, and we're going to die," I said as we sat down at a booth. For a gas station diner, the food was remarkably good. We paid for our meals and left town, heading for home again. We pulled into my driveway around 9:30 a.m. and walked lazily from the car.
"We need a 10-minute power nap, that's it," I said as we crawled into bed. We woke up three hours later and our sleep schedules weren't by any means "fixed," but I experienced a night I will surely never forget.
