It was a good thing that I had taken a rest day today, because I didn’t sleep very well. First of all, I found it almost impossible for me to get into my bunk for bed. My bunk was in the middle of a triple bunk with not much head room. It took a fancy “Cirque du Soleil” move to swing myself in. I am not the most flexible. Mask and ear plugs got me to sleep quickly, although the rest of the hostel guests were very quiet. There were 8 of us in this small room. About at 2 am I woke up very warm. There was a fan turned on before that was blowing cooler air into my bunk. That was now shut off and the night light was also off. “Who would do that!” I was thinking to myself. I decided to get up to turn the fan back on, without waking the rest of my bunk mates up. It was absolutely pitch dark, and I had to fumble and shuffle along to find the fan, which I couldn’t. I then tried to find the door, which took me some time. There were backpacks on the floor that I couldn’t see. I finally felt the door with my hands and got out. The main part of the hostel was pretty dark, with some moonlight shining through the windows. I tried to turn on the kitchen light, but nothing came on. Strange, why would they turn all the electricity off in the place? There were a couple couches, and I thought to sleep on those since it was cooler there. However, others had beat me to it, and were sprawled on them. Maybe it was too hot for them in the bedroom as well? I finally decided to get my sleep system off my bike on the back porch, blow up the mattress, lay down my sleeping bag, and lay it in the kitchen area to try to get more sleep. That worked until 6am when folks got up to make their breakfasts before heading out on the trail.
The bunk room.
In the end it turned out there was a city wide power outage, and not a sabotaging backpacker who had turned off the fans. Not happy I didn’t get much sleep, but it helped knowing what the cause was. Hopefully it doesn’t happen again tonight! Again, glad I had chooses to take a rest day today as well. After all the backpackers left, I climbed back into my bunk to take a late morning nap.
Later that day, Sean, Hamish, and Jess rolled into town and decided to stay at the hostel as well, even after I told them my tale of the evening before. We toured around town, and at Hamish’s urging, we all jumped in the river to float downstream. Hamish does have quite a history of doing adventurous escapades, including the grueling 1000 mile kayak race in Alaska. The river “swim” was definitely an adventure, since the water was flowing pretty fast, and there were some rapids to maneuver around. Probably would have been wise to have taken the complimentary life vests with us. We all survived unscathed, and enjoyed the refreshing dip since it was pretty warm out.
Breakfast
We explored the town a bit further and visited the “Oveja Negra” store that sells mainly bike packing bags that they hand sewn in Salida. I have a couple of their bags which are really nice. I decided to further support their business and buy some custom cross shoulder bags for the girls in my family. I’ll have to think of something else for the boys. They shipped them to Linda who will send them on.
All in all, a good day off the bike!
No comments:
Post a Comment