A few months ago I went out and purchased a new mattress, it was the first time in over a year that I had needed one. I gave away my last one when I moved onto my sailboat and then then I moved back into an apartment, it had a loft and I just bought a couple mattress pads to sleep on up there. After a few months though I was tired of climbing the stairs and wanted a nice mattress but I think box springs are a joke. I did some research on the internetz and found a few cheap solutions, namely this one from Instructables. I decided to duplicate it with a queen mattress. It’s been working great for months now!
Step 1: Buy a mattress and measure it.
Step 2: Stop by the store and buy some storage archive boxes! (I bought mostly standard but also a few extra-strength)
Step 3: Stuff the storage boxes with stuff you don’t use very often or want in your closet. Books, winter clothes, clothes that don’t fit, etc.
Step 4: Arrange the boxes so that there will be about 1in of the boxes showing around the edges.
Step 5(Optional): Put a mattress pad down on top of the boxes
Step 6: Toss your mattress on top and sleep soundly!
This has been kicking around in the draft folder of my gmail account for a few years. It’s a small glimpse into my thoughts from when I was backpacking around Brazil.
As I shake my groggy head and tossle the hair back from my eyes, I turn in my hammock to see a statue of Satan staring at me. As my pupils clear the sleep from them I notice that this is no ordinary devil, it is in fact a punk rock devil. Not only that, but someone has positioned him so that it is overlooking a native Brazilian Indian hand-carved wooden nativity scene. Satan seems to be taking great interest in the little manger. I stumble out of my bedroom, while pulling on my pants to find another strange scene before me. A stack of pancakes. In Brazil pancakes don’t exist, no maple syrup and no Mrs. Buttersworth. I know! I too was shocked at the prehistoric culinary tastes of the exotics. I turned and Sam, my roommate, said “How bad ass is that Beelzebub? Oh and those are yours”
I met Sam about two weeks before and nearly two-thousand miles away in Florianapolis, a city on the coast in southern Brazil. After several weeks of not hearing American English being spoken, we formed a companionship that only comes from such circumstances. We scoped out the local beaches and found that it was too cold by Brazilian standards for the girls to be out posing for us. We immediately decided to head North. We caught a 6 hour flight North to Salvador de Bahia, a city along the Northeast coast of the continent. Within a few hours of being there I had been robbed once and stalked by a drug dealer so I quickly decided it was not the place for me. I bid Sam farewell and caught a 18 hour bus further North to Fortaleza, a gorgeous city in the state of Ceara, and rented a brand new two bedroom apartment on the beach. Nothing beats a cheap room with a view. A week or two passed and one night on my way to find dinner, I saw Sam chilling on the curb talking to the necklace hawkers. The odds of us running into each other again were astronomical and yet, here we were. So I made the most of it and had him buy the first bottle of Antarctica.
A few days later and Sam had moved into the other room of the apartment. Life in Brazil was a constant buzz of strange and new. It’s close enough to western culture to be familiar but so far from what I knew growing up that it created a whole new sense of self-awareness. We spent our time eating crabs and lobster on the beach, drinking Antarctica beers, (Brazilians serve their beer so cold the water inside is partially frozen) and hitting the clubs. My friend Samila, a local english teacher, took us out a few times and invited us to talk to her English class at a local high school but other than hanging out with Samila and her friends our local interaction was with the young security guards for our apartment complex or at the clubs and bars.
Living overseas as a backpacker is a strange sensation. I think the feeling that I left the most was a mix between unbridled freedom and loneliness. Not loneliness like the kind you get when your dog dies but the kind you get from not hearing your own language spoken, you know, the kind you would get if your name was Kal-El and you were originally from a planet called Krypton, that kind of lonely. Every day is a new adventure though and it was not long before Sam and I woke up one morning and were ready to be someplace else. We shared a cab to the bus station and had some breakfast, I grabbed a bus to Brasilia and he someplace else. I remember watching out the window as he walked away, another traveler, who for a moment was my best friend and my brother, gone. Can you guess what feeling washed over me? I had weeks left on my trip and before going home I would laugh and cry with another best friend and his family in Sao Paulo, another traveler who I had met in my own country and invited me in when I was in his.
Backpacking boils everything down to it’s most raw. A plain syrup-less pancake tastes like it was made by angels and someone you just met becomes the closest thing you can have to family. There is no future and the past is just a blur of airports and bus stations, each beach deceptively similar to the last, every moment feeling more like this is how life was meant to be lived.
“Where is home for you?” you ask. “Home is wherever my backpack lies.” comes the response echoing down the hostel halls.
