As part of our mission trip, we basically have to bring all
the gear we need for sleeping/bathing/primping for the week. And while camping
outside is not my thing, outdoor camping is actually MUCH MORE accommodating than camping
on the concrete-a-thon that is San Eduardo.
After going to Ecuador last time, I decided I needed to upgrade my air
mattress. See….I thought we were supposed to be all economical with what we
packed….and my compact little air mattress reflected my good citizenship. Then on the last trip, I arrived in San
Eduardo to 25 missionaries pulling out the air mattress they use when their
brother-in-law comes to town. My REI
“starter kit” had me prepared to sleep on the side of a mountaintop that has been untouched by
civilization. Meanwhile, my roommate was
prepping her Westin-worthy Heavenly mattress.
I decided this year I should upgrade my mattress in the hopes of
actually sleeping during the trip.
Unfortunately, I am not exactly a well-informed shopper when
it comes to camping gear. I really
should do more than ask the REI salesperson – which one of these do you
recommend? Because the REI salesperson is
thinking millennial minimalist while I am thinking middle-class American spare
bedroom. So instead of a mattress
upgrade from the last trip, I inexplicably managed to spend $150 while ending up with a worse air mattress. (I am well on my
way to an entire garage sale’s worth of useless, but expensive, camping gear.)
Just to provide context… my roommate’s air mattress looked
like this>>
While my air mattress looked like this>>
Have I mentioned the Ecuadorians’ love of concrete? I don’t know about you, but my joints need
more than 3” of separation from the hardest surface known to man. My mattress should have come with a coupon
for a hip replacement.
The mattress ALSO should have come with a better description
of its operation. Or maybe I should have
just read the label. Here are words you
do not want to see upon arrival at your 1,000 degrees celsius new home: “built-in hand pump”. Ummmmm....I beg your pardon? I don’t know how well you know your camping
gear – but while this mattress is the perfect post-apocalypse accessory, there
is NO good reason to forego an electrical pump when my tent literally sits next to an electrical
outlet!!
So let me tell you how this works….the “built-in” pump is
actually this weird air-trapping mechanism built into the “pillow”. And as the name suggests, you inflate this bastard
by closing the sealant cap; pumping down on the pillow; unsealing the sealant
cap; releasing the pump (thereby sucking air into the pillow-pump); then sealing
it again and pumping. I know I didn’t
describe it properly because it is actually a non-sensical series of actions
that is supposed to eventually end up as an air mattress. All I know is that pumping up my little
sliver of an air mattress required repeating that ridiculously complicated
action about 600 times. I looked like I
had arrived in Ecuador and decided to suddenly get my CPR certification. I am sure the entire pillow was completely
soaked with the last vestiges of hydration I would see for a week.
The good news is once fully inflated, if you laid on it exactly right with your weight evenly
distributed, your body was, in fact, suspended in a mattress-like balance. The bad news is whenever I would roll over
(which, by the way, happens WAY more often than you would expect when sleeping
in a jungle), the equilibrium is disturbed, and a surprising number of body
parts are all battling Ecuadorian cement.
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