Sophomore and Junior Year

Well the train station did not have much to offer in the way of sleep, however the delightfully quirky town of Dwight provided a steady supply of mildly amusing people to watch.

Dwight, I dub thee the Town that never sleeps.

Even stranger than the endless trickle of Dwight folk who had no apparent business being up at 2:00 a.m. after a long hot Monday, was the fact that none of them seemed to pay any mind to two teenage kids who periodically shifted location from park bench to sleepless sleeping bags.

With no sleep in sight, we decided to relocate to a picnic table a few miles out of town before the sun made the downtown area unbearable. Setting up a temporary camp, we attempted to sleep away the day, with intentions to walk through the night.

However falling asleep on a picnic table, in 97 degree heat, a few feet from a barrel of decomposing fish corpses, with flies strolling up and down your arms and neck, is not something that they teach you how to do in highschool.

To all of my former teachers who are reading this- and don't bother hiding, I know you are out there- perhaps you could work that into your curriculum? Call it critical thinking or something like that? :)

Though in all fairness I guess I did leave highschool practiced in the way of sleeping with my head down on a hard surface...

When night finally came around we realized we had been kidding ourselves, and walking through the night was just not an option after sleeping only nine of the last seventy two hours. So we set up camp and spent another night among the beautiful people of Dwight.

We awoke the following morning around 11:00 in the company of a delightful uniformed man who was kind enough to take down our information and send us on our way without further consequences. 

Another day of walking and some neat-o corn fields brought us to our next destination, a public library, where we decided to wait out some afternoon showers.

Reading a book was wonderful, I had not felt that civilized since leaving home.

A mad dash under looming clouds carried us to our sleeping spot last night, yet another set of picnic tables under a pavilion off route 66.