Leaving New Orleans

The night passed even more miserably than I'd expected. I went to bed at around 11:00 and, I think, went to sleep fairly quickly. But by 1:00 the noise outside on Bienville Street--a main passageway to and from Bourbon--woke me up. I didn't feel too ill toward the revelers. As far as they were concerned, they were just passing with friends through the French Quarter of New Orleans; that they were yelling and laughing and playing bad music loudly below my hotel window didn't register with them. Why would it?

Then there was the almost proverbial Hollywood motel scene, in which I lay trying to get back to sleep while the couple next door made love. It wasn't the banging headboard and screaming of the movies but a fairly steady bumping and two stuttering voices.

All right, I thought, this ain't working for a ten-hour drive home tomorrow.

The main problem is that I'm a "white noise" sleeper, and I had no white noise. The air conditioner isn't that kind that will run constantly, but like one at home, cuts on and off as needed. Even when I turned the thermostat down to 64 degrees, it wouldn't stay on long enough for me to get to sleep. (And, of course, I was a bit chilly at that temperature.) But finally, at about 2:30, I had an idea. I googled "white noise" and "sleep." The first couple of pages of results were commercial sites selling white noise machines, but at last I found a site that offered to play some white noise for me for free. It played a sound something like a way-too-steady rain for a period of an hour and fifteen minutes. So over the next three or four hours, between the air conditioner and the web site, I slept in 75-minute bursts. It wasn't a good night's rest, but it was something.

Enough for now. I'll shave, shower and pack. Call for the car and hit the road. I expect I'll make it home tonight around 10:00.