Chapter Two
Shakedown Cruise
April 21, 2009—Gold Bluffs Beach, CA: To check that we had everything we'd need, and especially to check out the air mattress that I'd gotten for $4 at a garage sale, we went on a quick one-night camping shakedown trip.
Camping isn’t much fun if you aren’t comfortable sleeping. If you’re counting the minutes until dawn and wishing you were on a nice, soft bed of nails, you’re not going to be a … well, a happy camper. So a good mattress is job one.
The garage-sale mattress was in like-new condition. As comfortable as our mattress at home, it fit in the tent like a cork in a wine bottle. The pump inflated and deflated it in about one minute using four rechargeable AA cells (in D cell adapters).
At 1 AM, something was up, and I started dreaming I was on a waterbed. By 3:30 AM the mattress had deflated completely, without any assistance from the batteries, and we were on the hard ground. This is the ground that has gotten significantly harder since turning 50 (I was 56 when we made this trip). Since the mattress fit the tent so snugly, we had to get outside to blow it up again, and it stayed inflated until morning. When I got home, I tracked down the leak and repaired it with PVC cement and duct tape. This sounds kludgey, but it is the officially sanctioned procedure.
But we had a good time in general, and a great breakfast of eggs, bacon, and home-baked bread. All systems were go for our trip.