You have to admire the constitution of campers who can actually sleep in a noisy parking lot in town. Do engines ever get shut off? You get to enjoy trains, boom cars, loudspeakers on the pole lights, semi-trucks pulling up in the middle of the night, and perhaps worst of all, predatory strafing of your RV by the parking lot Zamboni.
So why do it? There are practical advantages such as minimizing driving while accomplishing shopping errands. And there are plenty of $30 per night RV parks that are half as loud as a free parking lot.
There are tricks in parking lots that will get you a few hours of sleep:
1) It is surprising how quiet a semi-truck can be if you are parked aft of its trailer, rather than sideways-adjacent to the engine and Thermo-King refrigerator.
2) It's also surprising how restful it can be to sleep next to a busy freeway, since the sound is so steady.
3) White noise helps quite a bit too. You can use music, a DVD movie, or whatever.
4) Stay up late at night and get up late in the morning. Of course it's pretty hard to make this adjustment when you're used to going to bed at 8 pm. In the summer, a late riser in the morning would miss the time of the day that's worth living for.
Tricks like this help, but it works better to find a dead-end street.
But my mission was accomplished: I have a fear and dread of the unbelievable rheology of wet Mancos Shale. My BLM campsite was at the end of five miles of the stuff, so I wanted out of there while the first winter storm blew through.
Comments
I could never get those little yellow foam ones to stay in my ear.