Sin City

We have had some trouble working out the intricacies of a lengthy, restful night's sleep. I'm sure it's because the Dacha is too comfortable, rather than the other way around. If, to be up here on Orcas right now, I had to sleep in a tent on rocky ground with a punctured, 2/3-length Thermarest pad, as I have done in the past, I would be unhappy, but resigned. The Dacha loft, however, with its 5-inch foam mattress and 2-inch Memory Foam topper, is comparatively so much like sleeping in a real bed that one is disproportionately disappointed by how much better it could be.

One of the issues is size. Although we have a queen bed at home and this is only a full, the width is not really an issue. Counterintuitively, it seems at first (when one is perched six and a half feet above the floor), we actually use more of the width of the bed than we would at home. I sleep right up against the wall, and Ian has a guard rail.

The length of a full-sized bed is also less than a queen, however, plus our feet butt up against the 45° ceiling angle. I spend a lot of midnight hours dimly aware in my state of mostly-sleep that my size-eleven feet are growing numb against the end of the bed. Ian can angle himself very slightly so his feet lie under one of the mini-dormers, so he does better.

Another issue is temperature. We have a mattress cover on the bottom, then Ian's cotton flannel-lined Coleman sleeping bag unzipped on that, then my own much-frayed, but still quite warm, 25-year-old cotton flannel-lined Coleman sleeping bag unzipped on that. We have a couple Samburu blankets that we can use in the depths of winter after the Little Cod stove has burned out and the Dacha has cooled. We don't really have an opposite option for the summer, when the Dacha has heated up and the anticipated cooling, maritime cross-breeze between the Swedish air vent and the new porthole, has been a whisper rather than a wind.

The other night, we woke in the pitch dark bathed in sweat, our sleeping bags heavy with moisture. Panting, we threw off the top one (or rather, wedged it down into the triangle at our feet), and lay there, slowly evaporating, trying to come up with a solution.

"We have some kikoys," I remarked, thinking of the thin, cotton cloths we'd brought back from Kenya and which had many uses, including beach towels, wall hangings, and occasionally sheets.

Ian, always the gentleman in matters of the loft, found his headlamp and clambered down the ladder to dig them out.

The next night, which again threatened heat, I dug through our options. We have brought a lot of things, a lot of stuff, up to the island. We have said "Oh, wouldn't that be great in the Dacha!" about many things that we simply didn't want to get rid of. Very few of these things actually *have* been great in the Dacha; most have simply taken up precious space (and are currently stored in the tent Dan stayed in, waiting until we pack them back home next weekend).

When the best thing I could come up with was a shower curtain we'd thought might create a changing area, Ian suggested taking a trip to King's Market in Friday Harbor to see if they had an actual sheet set we could buy.

one-fingered on my phone