Bill and I are not even close to being royalty, but we did need a queen mattress to replace our make-do airbed, which was kind of like sleeping on a half-filled waterbed. We couldn’t cuddle in the middle because our weight needed to be evenly spaced on each side of the bed to keep the mattress flat. Any movement out of bed by either of us would cause a squeaky tsunami-like airwave and a tired flop into bed would practically launch the other sleeping partner into the ionosphere. Needless to say, the airbed was not working as well as we had hoped.
Our nearest big city is San Esidro de General which is about a forty-five minute drive away. Surely a city with several appliance and furniture store chains would have a mattress that we could pick up. Once again, how misguided we were to give ourselves only a few hours to find and pick up a mattress and several other things on our long shopping list. In Costa Rica, we’ve learned you should never expect to do things urgently. Sometimes even the simplest things require extraordinary patience and time.
Colchon (with an accent over the 2nd O) is the Spanish word for mattress
We should have known that we were going to have problems at the first and biggest store that we went to. The smiling and helpful sales clerk said that they had colchones and lead us to a forgotten corner of the store, which had a few tons of mattresses, stacked up in the corner. Things were looking good until he told us that none of them were queen sized. It turns out that Ticos prefer king or full mattresses. Queen sized mattresses are almost non-existent.
We needed one today, Bill informed him. No problem, the smiling and helpful sales clerk got on the telephone to try and locate a queen mattress for us. As so often happens in Costa Rica, the clerk disappeared from sight, to make some telephone calls on our behalf while we’re left standing around the store wondering how long its going to take. More often than not, the clerk comes back to tell you he can’t get what you want, as was the case here. Since you can no longer help us, "Can you recommend someplace else in town that might have queen mattresses?" we asked. At which point, the sales clerk ceases to be smiling and helpful. He’s probably lived in the town all his life and yet can’t tell us another store in town that sells mattresses.
It turns out there are a lot of stores that sell mattresses, just not queen mattresses, and we probably visited every one of them. Every time Bill was told they could special order a mattress and it would be here in a week or two, he became a man possessed and headed for another area of town. All of this was on foot, as I struggled to keep up with him. I should also mention that we were both carrying around twelve pound laptops on our shoulders, which got heavier as the afternoon wore on.
We were not sleeping on the rocket launcher air mattress another night. The stores we went to kept getting smaller, less catering to gringos and started becoming not much more than holes in the wall. Holes in the wall sometimes yield surprising treasures though. Finally, we were led up a dark, rickety flight of stairs to the last remaining queen mattress in San Isidro de General.
We bought it, strapped it to the Junglemobile with a little help and headed home for a restful night's sleep.
Afterward
It’s a great orthopedic mattress. Sleeps fine and firm.
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