There’s something strangely peaceful about nightfall on a Greyhound. I felt this on a December 2018 trip from Chicago to Los Angeles, as we passed through New Mexico. The dark and quiet enveloped me, seeming to calm the whole bus. The sun was down before 5 p.m., and within minutes, it might as well have been midnight. Soon I slid headphones in, closed my eyes, and leaned my head against the window, drifting off.

Unfortunately, nothing about the next twelve hours was set up to provide a good night’s sleep. At every stop — and there were several — the lights blazed on, and the driver droned into the microphone. In Albuquerque, we were asked to disembark while the bus was cleaned or the driver took some (much-deserved) rest. I stumbled into the night, bleary-eyed and foggy-headed, steeling myself to keep awake for an hour because I was afraid to snooze through my boarding call. Thankfully, there was a documentary about monkeys playing in the station — a rare luxury on these trips. But I couldn’t finish it before I was herded back on the bus.

A few more hours of patchy shut-eye end in a spectacular Arizona sunrise, and it’s suddenly too bright to sleep — another night survived on a Greyhound. I’m tired, stiff, and still worried about whether the monkey from the documentary survived the winter. But this is about the best you can hope for, from what seems almost designed to be a miserable experience.