Tales of Freezing Nights 2: The trip to Melbourne
We had been driving all day as part of our family road trip to Melbourne and it was now around 8pm somewhere in the vastly unpopulated areas of Victoria getting slightly desperate for a place to spend the night. I don't know if you ever happen to have been piled into a car with your parents and two older brothers, squished in the middle seat and used a headrest for both siblings' pillows and subjected to 57 repeated plays of the same Neil Young songs for 8 hours while being faced with no source of dinner and no place to spend the night as you drive down a pitch black road that gradually becomes just a dirt road with no signs of life. When even Dad hit the point of being highly suspicious that the people at the "Stop.Revive.Survive" may have been mistaken in their directions to the nearest motel, we were getting a little worried. But no, a strange farmer who HAPPENED to be out checking his mail (at 8pm) pointed us a little further down the pitch black dirt road, promising that there was indeed a motel where we could rent a room and have dinner at the Tavern. Looking back, I would have had my suspicions that this was in fact some wanted murderer who works in tandem with the Survivor Reviver people to lure innocent families to their doom. But that's just cynical of me, here this lovely weird old man did indeed point us the right way and we ended up having dinner and getting a room.
Now here's when the blanket deprivation begins. I'll remind you that this was the dead of winter in Victoria, where it's freezing even in summer, and even with blankets it was that sort of cold where you feel like straightening your legs is like plunging them into ice water. We had a room with 2 double beds and one single. Mum and Dad took one double and Christian took the single while Nic and I were content to share the double. After the usual chatter we all eventually fell asleep.
It was around 1am when I awoke and felt like my feet were two blocks of ice. There was this incessant flashing light from a neon sign flickering through the curtains on my side of the bed and the air-conditioner unit would every now and again suddenly go
*CLICK!*HUMMMMMMMMMMMM!!!!!!
...making it near impossible to relax. But none of that compared to the cold. I swear this is the coldest I have ever been. It was like the car trip on super arctic blasting air con mode. I was shivering so much but I was so sleepy I couldn't think of anything intelligent to do and my muscles wouldn't work. I couldn't understand why on earth the motel would only provide a flimsy threadbare sheet. Seriously this thing was the flimsiest sheet with a thread count of about 3 and what's more is I didn't even have enough of the sheet to cover my whole body! Most of it was trapped underneath or around Nic so I only had half my body under this god awful sheet. I tried feebly tugging on the sheet but this, no joke, resulted in Nic rolling so that EVEN MORE sheet was ripped away from me. I spent most of the night curled in a ball trying to pull threads of sheet over me shivering to my core with neon lights flashing in my face and the hum of the aircon unit keeping me constantly on the brink of my sanity (WHY would this need to be on?!? It definitely was NOT heating the room and if it was cooling the room I think I will cry). I finally fell asleep and had a horrible nights sleep, freezing cold and uncomfortable.
I woke up freezing in the morning and saw in the light: Nic with the entire sheet AND DOONA wrapped around him. THERE WAS A DOONA THIS WHOLE TIME! And he had so much doona he didn't even need it all! Half the doona was spilling onto the floor next to him completely going to waste and the rest was piled into mountains on top of his stupid warm body. I woke him up with a swift pillow to the head.
Winter Gods: 2 Lisa: 0
MORE FROM FREEZING NIGHTS! MORE!
Freezing Nights 3 >
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