The Saga of the MattressMobile

I wrote this for an email to convince a house of 20-somethings to let me live with them, but I got carried away and it turned into blog post-fodder. Yes, this is totally true; I do this kind of ridiculous stuff.

June, 2009. I stayed in San Diego after school finished because I wanted to find a job there, and while most of my friends had gone back up north, I was still closer to my San Diego friends than my hometown friends. I budgeted a week and a half to find a job and a room; by the end of that, still with no job, I called it quits and got ready to fly up north. Before that, I had to get everything to storage.

When everyone else moved out, we had a jeep and a van to haul mattresses. The jeep was gone, and I assumed I could borrow the van. Assumptions aren't a good idea, and the day before I was supposed to fly out, I had nothing to move with.

Cue my brilliant insight: the mattress frame had wheels.

So it’s 5 p.m and I'm pulling my mattress down the sidewalk on La Jolla Village Drive. I've looped rope around it and wrapped the ends in duct tape; I'm hauling it with one end of rope over each shoulder. It's five and a half miles of walking/rolling, and I’ve got until nine before they close. Plenty of time, right?

I get stuck at an off-ramp exit, a blind turn with no stoplight. With mattress in tow, it takes me at least fifteen minutes before there’s enough of a gap to sprint-pull it five feet. Once I reach the far side, the wheels start drifting, falling off the sidewalk. It’s slow going.

I hit the left turn onto Camino Santa Fe. My directions are back at the apartment, and I’m looking for any street with a familiar name. Santa Fe trails uphill and sundown’s starting. I haul my cargo past empty offices and past business parks, looking for another unknown street. By the time I crest the hill, the sun’s gone down. It’s 8 p.m.; I’ve got at least two miles to go; I start downhill.

Five minutes later, I’m dragging the mattress back up every agonizing inch – wrong street. Time was running out. The next street over is the right one to go downhill on, but there’s at least one more hill to climb beyond it. I have to make up some time, and fast.

I sit on the mattress, lean a foot to the side to steer, and start driving the mattress downhill.

Halfway down, an axle burns out.

As far as I know, the MattressMobile’s final resting place was a parking space in a business park at the top of the hill. There was at least a quarter mile of steep uphill climb beyond the flat ground I almost reached.