Before you accuse me,
take a look at yourself
The rural campground where I stayed.
I’d been staying almost a week on my friend’s prepaid spot in a rural campground. It was a peaceful place with huge sites, nothing like the RV parking lots I’ve seen across the U.S. No one parked near me until the seventh night, when I returned to my van home after a cook-out to find a Class C on my cut-across route to the bath house. No big deal. I altered my path and didn’t think much about it.
It was a warm night, and before crawling into bed, I set up my small, battery operated fan in the back window. I drifted to sleep with a cool breeze blowing on my face.
I woke a little before 4am, needing to pee. The entire groggy time I dealt with that situation, I could hear a mechanical sound, a sort of distant humming.
What is that noise? I asked myself. It must be those new people! It must be their generator! Those idiots are running their generator in the middle of the night. They can’t do that! Don’t they know they can’t do that? Don’t they know this is quiet time? They can’t run a generator during quiet hours. Who thinks it’s ok to run a generator in the middle of the night?
As I woke up more fully, I wondered if I were really hearing a generator. What else might the noise be?
I got back in bed and put my ear close to the window, trying to better hear the noise so I could discern what was making it. When I put my ear next to the window, I found my ear next to the fan I had forgotten about and the whir of its motor. Oh. I hadn’t been hearing a loud generator in the distance. I’d been hearing the soft hum of my own fan up close.
I went back to sleep, feeling like an idiot.
The view from my campsite.
I took the photos in this post.