Although we spent four nights in hotels during our vacation in California, we slept the other five nights in a camper van – and when I say “camper van,” I’m being as generous as possible. It was actually a minivan that some guys in a garage had converted by replacing the middle row of seats with a wooden footlocker that unfolded so that we could lay a futon mattress flat and sleep on it, after a fashion. Although it seemed like a great idea at the time, I also used to go camping by unrolling a thin foam pad on the ground and sleeping on that, which I wouldn’t even think of trying these days, so I don’t know how I thought this would work.

Funny thing is, it did work, sort of. It was really nice to be able to drive around in a normal-sized car instead of a big honking camper and then at night unroll the mattress, curl up in the back and go to sleep. Two things in that scenario don’t work very well, though:

First of all, the mattress was not made for my fifty-two year old back. You know that scene in several movies where the old guy goes to sleep in somebody’s guest bedroom and when he wakes up in the morning he can’t sit up or turn his head? I used to watch those scenes and think, Pshaw! How can a soft, comfy mattress mess up your back like that? Well, I’m still not sure how, but after last week I know it’s not just some stupid plot gimmick. It really happens. After a couple nights on that mattress my lower back started to twinge and ache, and by the end of the week I could hardly sit up to get out of bed, which is one of the biggest reasons I voted “YES!” when we were considering staying another night in a hotel in San Francisco.

Second of all, headroom. After you put a mattress on top of a foot locker in the back of a minivan, there isn’t any. Getting into bed at night involved climbing up on top of the locker, rolling over onto the mattress and then squirming around to slowly worm our way to the back of the van. To get out, throw the sequence of events into reverse and add the threat of falling on your ass as you climb down backwards from on top of the footlocker. Tricky enough when you’ve got all the time in the world, but throw in having to pee in the middle of the night and it gets even trickier.

The easiest way I can think of to improve their setup would be to yank out the rearmost row of seats and lay a thicker mattress right down on the floor. We never used the seats in the back anyway.

The only other thing wrong with the converted minivan concept was that, in at least one campground where most of the “campers” lived in sixty-foot-long fifth-wheel pull-behinds with rooms that popped out the sides, the campground owners seemed to think we were hobos living out of our car. But I thought that was funny enough to make the whole trip worthwhile.