Sleeping in your car

A few days ago I was listening to the radio and the station was having people call in to tell their best 'sleeping in their car' stories. My fondest (only in retrospect, by the way) memory of sleeping in a car took place right after I graduated high school.

In celebration of graduating high school, I decided to travel to Hawaii for a month. My sister was going to be traveling with me for the entire trip and my mom and a friend of hers where traveling with us for the first 2 weeks. This happened after my mom and her friend went home. My sister and I were on the island of Maui. We were camping at the time, moving from campsite to campsite whenever the mood struck us. For those of you not familiar with camping in Hawaii, it is generally very cheap (if not free) and I mean really, you're in Hawaii so your probably spending most of your time sleeping on the beach under a Palm tree anyways, why pay for a hotel? Every place we went was gorgeous and some of the best camping I've even been lucky enough to take part it. However, we had recently been camping up on Mount Haleakala and my sister had met this guy. Nothing happened except some friendly conversation but I didn't really like him. He was kind of weird and I was being pissy about my sister ditching me for a guy. Anywho, a few days later we were taking our home on wheels rental car out mobbing on hardened lava that our rental car company had explicitly told us not to drive on for a nice leisurely drive and we found this cool beach. We were hanging out and sure enough we ran into the weird guy that my sister had met. They were camping there and had invited us to stay there as well. I threw a hissy fit and said I wanted to camp somewhere else because I was worried that something might happen to the car and blah blah blah (when really I just didn't want to hang out with this guy).

After I threw my little hissy fit, my sister and I decided to camp somewhere else. We had seen a few campgrounds by the hotel we stayed in when my mom and her friend were still in town so we went to that area. Did I mention it was the 4th of July so all of the campsites were full except one. Ah, except that faithful creepy, horror-movie, psycho, don't-drink-the-koolaid campground. Most campgrounds in Hawaii are state or federal government owned. This place was a private campground for some religious group. THIS WAS THE WEIRDEST PLACE I'VE EVER BEEN. Most campgrounds in Hawaii are surrounded by lush, tropical forests with lots of pretty flowers and grass. This place was like the areas in Hawaii the Christians must have subject the natives to in order to make them comply with their wishes. The campground was next to the water, but the waterline was lined with these horrible nasty trees that had thorns the size of my arm sticking off of them that hurt like a fucking bastard when you inadvertently stepped on one and it poked you through your flip flop. Instead of lush, grassy areas to lay your tent down, this place has 8x8 foot piece of carpet caked in 10 years of Hawaiian dust and mud for you to put your tent down on. Instead of relatively clean sani-hits for you to pee in, this place has these creepy bathroom stalls that I am pretty sure probably had hidden camera's installed somewhere in them. And instead of any type of Hawaii flora anywhere surrounding the campground, this place has been weedwacked down to the bare ground. And on top of all of this, this place has some pretty nice cabins located directly adjacent to the campground, complete with indoor bathrooms, washing machines, dryers, a refrigerator and ice machine, phones and nice grassy areas with lawn chairs to hang out in. HOWEVER, "Those are ONLY for the people staying here with 'the church'." Did I mention that when we got there, after paying $15.00 for the night (like I said, most places in Hawaii are either free or like $5.00 a night to camp) this creepy religious weirdo had to give us a tour of everything I described above, included the entire cabin area. However, throughout the entire portion of the tour of the cabins, after every sentence he would say "Those are ONLY for the people staying here with 'the church'" I still to this day so not know what 'Church' he was referring to...

So whatever, we pay the $15.00, let the creepy little religious pervert give us a tour and then go sit in the hammock, underneath the death trees (with the giant thorns) and spend the rest of the evening at the park down the road because we are too creeped out to stay there. So we go to a BBQ at the park, watch the fireworks, almost get ourselves lite on fire by some locals who were setting off their own fireworks and then go back to the campground to sleep. The reason we almost got lite on fire was because it has gotten VERY windy late in the day. I know I've mentioned this campground has almost no vegetation. Which meant, as we were lying in our tent trying to sleep, every time a gust of wind would blow through our desert of a campground, it would catch a bunch of dirt and blow it right inside our tent. This kept happening, like every 30 seconds, for maybe 2 hours until my sister and I finally got so fed up that we went and sat in the car to try and decide what to do. You know, now that we paid $15.00 to sleep in the shittiest, creepiest campground in the world? And you know, because it was 2 am by then? We finally decide (as did about half a dozen other people who were in the same position as us) to pack up our dirt covered belongings and hit the road. We rolled up our tent, with all of our belongings inside of it, and stuffed it in the backseat of the car. We hit the road and headed back to the park we had left not long earlier. On our way there, we stopped at a Chevron to fill up on gas (so we could leave the car running with the heat on, since our blankets were covered in dust). While we were filling up, we had opened the truck to grab something and this bum comes walking over to us (he saw our cooler in the trunk) and asks for something to eat. We open in quickly and hand him an apple, hoping that will satisfy him and he will leave. We were wrong, he reaches in the trunk, opens the lid to the cooler and say, "No, I want that!" and points at some cheese we had. At this point we were totally freaked out and just handed over the cheese. Finally this tough ass night attendant chick comes out and scares away the bum, thank god because my sister and I had no idea what to do but hand over our food! So after all of this, we drive to the park and take our tent and sleeping bags out and shake them out and lay them on the grass to air out. We then take showers in their little outdoors showers (you know, the ones meant for rinsing off after you get out of the ocean) because we, as well, are covered in dust. We then get in our car and take a nap until about 6 am in our car in the parking lot of this park, with our shit spread out all over the park (in retrospect, we probably should have waited until morning to spread our stuff all over the place to avoid it possibly getting stolen while we were sleeping, but oh well, nothing happened!). After we woke up, we put some of our stuff away and proceeded to go back to sleep on our towels in the park for a few more hours. Needless to say, we rented a hotel room the next night!

Do you have a great 'sleeping in your car' story? Share it with me...