kevin_standlee: (Kevin and Lisa)
kevin_standlee ([personal profile] kevin_standlee) wrote2009-08-01 04:00 am
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Uneasy Squeaks the Shower

I found the lower bunk much more comfortable than the smaller roomette bunk coming down from Oregon. Also, we got four big pillows rather than two thin ones, which helped a great deal. Shortly after we left Elko, I set up my CPAP machine – Lisa having run an extension cord so I could do so more easily – and let the train rock me to sleep.

Around 3:30, I woke up, realizing that Lisa hadn't gotten any sleep at all. The shower compartment on our refurbished Superliner is a separate module that replaced the older shower compartment, and it's made of a lighter weight plastic than the original. [livejournal.com profile] travelswithkuma has a picture of him sitting in the toilet-shower compartment. It doesn't appear that the designers gave enough thought to how the compartment would behave in a constantly jostling train, and no matter how many shims, washcloths, etc. Lisa jammed into various cracks and seams, the compartment constantly gave off the squeak of plastic on plastic. It didn't bother me nearly as much as it did Lisa, who simply could not go to sleep with the squeak, squeak, squeak of the shower. "A diesel engine rumbling next door, I wouldn't mind," she said, "but this is driving me crazy. It's like trying to sleep while someone scrapes a chalkboard."

One of the reasons I woke up was that we were stopped in Salt Lake City. There is indeed a huge amount of schedule recovery here. Despite being roughly 30 minutes late all the way from California, we arrived at SLC more than 45 minutes before our scheduled 4:20 departure. With the train stopped, the squeak quit as well, and Lisa climbed back into bed to try and get to sleep before we got moving again.

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