Shawn L. Bird

prompt #61 What is the longest you’ve been awake?

The morning dawned with excitement.  Today our exchange group was off to Quebec!  Our Quebecois ‘jumelles’ had been in town for two weeks, I had celebrated my 16th birthday with them, and now it was our turn to explore a new community on the other side of the country.  Of course, it was a red eye charter, but we were young and filled our jumelles’ last  day with fun before heading to the airport for our midnight flight to Vancouver. 

In Vancouver, several hundred teens were sent to an army drill hall to wait for our flight which was to depart in the wee hours of the morning.  We were starting to get distinctly blurry eyed at this point, without much to do but visit.  Some napped, some, like me, were still too excited about the cross Canada journey to consider sleeping.  It was something like 6 a.m when the plane left the tarmack in Vancouver.  We watched the sun rise across the country and landed in the very empty Mirabel Airport in Montreal.  Some of the group left us in Montreal, the rest of us waited for buses to take us to our host communities. 

My bus took us first to Quebec  City, then another bus took us south into the Beauce region.  It was now dinner time.  My jumelle’s parents greeted us, fed us a lovely dinner, and then she told them about her adventures in the West.  Somewhere around ten or eleven o’clock we crashed from exhaustion and I slept fourteen hours to recover.  We had been awake for over forty hours.

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I have since had several other long trips with many connections and time changes.  I have many times been awake close to  this long (or perhaps longer), but this was the first such adventure, and it remains rooted firmly in my memory.