Challenge #01412-C317: To Sleep...

At around 3am she discovered the neighbours had a rooster -- OohLookShiny

It was the worst night of her life. And it started in the airport.

Her flight had to sit in a holding pattern for so long that she worried that it would fall out of the sky from lack of fuel. Then the TSA "randomly selected" her because she looked brown enough to be a terrorist, and insisted on searching both her and her things while she verbally catalogued everything in her suitcase.

Then she had to run like hell in order to catch the last courtesy bus of the evening or face having to wait two hours for the next one.

The bus took her on a Leyland's Tour through every pothole and every road works site in existence through the greater area of the city and suburbs.

She got dropped off at a dark bus stop and had to use her dying phone to get google directions to her AirBnB host for the evening. At least they'd sent her a key and had left the light on, so she could let herself in without disturbing the family who lived there.

The bedroom was the typical spare room, and the shower - as warned - was under renovations but she didn't care. The water restrictions were a slight problem, but the hot water shut-off was worse. And because of the TSA, it took her half an hour to find her PJ's. And clean underpants.

The bed was hard. The sheets were musty, and there was a nocturnal pet that seemed to be roaming the house at weird moments, judging by the occasional scrabbling noise in random positions in the dark. And because of all the procedural drama she usually loved, she screamed when the pet landed on the foot of the bed in the wee small hours of the morning.

The pet then had a scrabbling panic attack all over the house. Waking one member of the family who then took it to their bed.

The pet was named Skiffle, which gave no clue as to its species or gender.

At around 3AM she discovered that the neighbours had a rooster.

At 4AM Skiffle decided to re-investigate her loaned bed and cut off the circulation of her left leg and have the loudest tongue bath in the universe.

At 5, one member of her host family got up and started rattling around in the kitchen, causing Skiffle to use her legs as a launching pad so it could go and beg for food.

Today, she would go shopping for a compactable mat she could sleep on. Something she could vacuum-compress into her luggage.

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