How to Juggle Mattresses

We’ve been sleeping on the mattress Airstream provides for almost three years now, which, in RV-mattress years, has to be waaaay too long. (The average person with an RV spends 35 days per year in theirs, and Finn tells me that means we’ve spent 30 years in ours in a direct comparison.) My point is: we’ve turned our mattress and put a layer of air-flow spongy stuff under it, but there’s no escaping the divots we’ve made on both sides.

So, we got online and shopped for our very strange mattress requirements. The size has to be an RV queen, aka short queen, aka the kind of mattress you can buy worth shit for only $100 or for $3k, neither of which we wanted. Add to that the fact that ours has rounded edges at the end corners so we can pass beside it without injury (that’s called radial corners, turns out). That really limits a person.

So, we went with a foam mattress that comes in a box because we read that Airstream owners cut the corners with electric tools, no problem.

Turns out those foam ones need to sit for a few days before you can sleep on them. But where would ours sit?

When I got a ping from UPS that the new one would arrive that day, I awoke suddenly to the logic problem we were facing. Or, Tracy woke me to it. Here’s how our texting went (he was out birding, poor guy):

“The mattress comes today! I’ll strip the bed and get ready.”

“I can’t take the old one to the dump on a weekend.”

“Oh yeah. What if we lay the new one on the old one while the new one puffs up.”

“I can’t get the old one out of the trailer if it’s underneath the new one.”

“Oh yeah.”

How were we gonna do this?

One bird at a time, as a friend likes to say. First, I stripped the old mattress and found places to put all our bedding for the night. Like, in the shower.

And behind the sofa. So much for no clutter.

Then Tracy had to figure out if the old mattress would fit in the back of the truck. First he had to unload some of the truck bed into the tent. Again, not a pretty sight, but thank God for the tent. (Can you believe there’s still a ton of stuff in the truck bed?)

In the end: SUCCESS. We got the old mattress out of the trailer without bloodshed. And I found a bunch of hair scrunches beside the bed, which is a bonus score.

We also got the old mattress in the bed of the truck. AND we got the new one in the trailer and situated on the bed frame without incident.

Now we have three nights of sleeping on the sofa. I am not kidding.

My sleep is so miserable right now that maybe the change will do me good, though. I just have to live with the clutter in the trailer until then, and we have to try to keep Banjo off the new mattress as it’s inflating. (She jumps up on our bed only when we leave her alone in the trailer; we pretend we don’t know so she can have that as a solace while we’re gone. Think she knows we know?)

Heck, maybe I’ll sleep well on the new mattress, and I’m actually ushering in a new dawn of health for myself here! Stay tuned.

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