June 2025 Island Trip – Day 3

The cat (barely) let us sleep until 8AM 🐈‍⬛. We enjoyed our Sunday farmer’s breakfast, after feeding the cat 😏, and then got to work on installing a new system for under our mattress. This is a travel trailer/RV thing where a mattress sits directly on a platform in a coach where condensation is always a struggle. If you don’t have anything under the mattress to facilitate airflow, you’re asking for mold and/or mildew. We had a pad that work adequately, but its exposed edges around the mattress were most unpleasant when one came into contract with them. The pad was made up of stiff plastic ‘wires.’ They poked and scratched. I trimmed the pad at one point, but it still bit at every opportunity.

Friends of ours have a high tech Australian travel trailer, and showed us the system they has under their mattress. I wrote down the name, Froli , a couple of years ago. After being snagged again on our last trip, I ordered the fancy (and expensive) system. It went together fairly easily. Getting our mattress out of the bedroom is impossible as it arrived in a compressed cylinder which was unpackaged in the bedroom… We shoved the mattress up against the wall as best as possible… While we think Stella is super roomy, she is only 8.5’ wide. A ‘short’ queen bed takes up the majority of the bedroom floor space.

Getting the mattress back onto its platform, square over this new system, wasn’t as challenging as I thought is was going to be. In remaking the bed, you can see underneath from one side of the mattress to the other. While we haven’t had any condensation problems, this will be better, and boasts adding ‘springs’ to your sleep experience! This mattress is the most comfortable (for me) one, of three, that we sleep on. It cost almost 6x less than our mainland mattress 🧐. OK, I’m done geeking out about mattress preservation systems 😂.

I got a lot of mowing done. For shits and giggles I’m keeping track of how many hours I’m spending mowing this trip, in 15-minute intervals. 3.75 hours in two days so far. This time of year is dense both because it’s the first time I can get to everything due to the water table finally being low enough not to swallow the riding mower, and everything is growing gangbusters: still lots of water, and it’s warming up! I’ll finish up with the rider tomorrow (guessing 2-hours) and then move to the push mower and then the line trimmer (but not all tomorrow 😜). The place looks amazing.

While passing by the apples and plum, I saw that we do have plums (!!!!!!!!!!), and at least one tree has apples. A closer look is required to assess the other apples.

My DH discovered something today. He was setting up LJG for work tomorrow, and didn’t have adequate connectivity at his computer or his phone. This has never happened, and was cause for a bit of alarm. He discovered pretty quickly that his car was the problem! It was parked in between the router and the office trailer. Easy fix. He also used the remainder of the new mattress system (yeah, I said I was done) to improve his seating for work! We have zero left over bits 😁.

We had dinner with Tim this evening. It’s been 5-months since we’ve seen him. He was in good form, and seemed a little steadier on his feet. He told us heavy equipment stories that included watching a massive bulldozer tipping off of its trailer, being uprighted by a huge tow truck, and then going on to grade Tim’s job site. Also a concrete truck, trying to get into the same job site, that ended up crushing a culvert and then falling down the hill as the road failed 😳. I love my older friends for many reasons, and one is certainly for sharing their stories. 💜

We arrived home to a cat that forgot he’d been fed, but that’s not new 😅.