Hi everyone, my name is Otis Gray and you're listening to Sleepy.

A podcast where I read old books to help you get to sleep.

Tonight is kind of a bonus episode for you and it's actually a two makeup for a couple weeks back

when I was on the road traveling and it was hard to find a quiet recording space and I was moving

around a lot and we had one week where we did not have an episode so I just wanted to give you

a little extra sleeping content this week. We're going to be reading from my absolute favorite

Nathaniel Hawthorne, another very snoozy short story that he wrote even though I think his writing

is really really engaging. I'll try to read it as boring as possible.

And before we start, a lot of you have reached out through Instagram and Patreon and email asking me

how my trip was and just as a quick update on the podcast be it was pretty amazing. I was going for

three weeks and it was the first time I really drove across country all over to California and back.

I went across the center of the country you know through the Midwest where it's all flat.

I went to Utah to Colorado, Nevada, over to California and made my way up through Oregon

across Idaho to South Dakota and back to Vermont. It was a really astounding trip.

I covered a lot of ground. I saw so many things that I can't believe I've waited this long to see

into a lot of national parks like Arches and Bryce Canyon, Canyon Land. I got up to the Redwoods

up towards the Oregon border to Yellowstone and the T-tons and the Badlands. It was incredible.

It was really really eye-opening. I think sometimes easy to forget, especially in the pandemic or if you

live on the coast, how enormous and how beautiful this country is and how sparsely populated a lot of it

is as well. It was a very grounding experience. I got to satisfy some of my wanderlust while I worked

along the way on the Sesame Street project that I mentioned I was working on bedtime podcasts

for kids called Good Night World. I was working along the way while I was seeing all this amazing stuff

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