For the last twelve summers, my wife Jenna and I have slept on an air mattress while the five kids took the tent floor in their sleeping bags. That was the plan, anyway. The plan usually fell apart around 2 a.m. when the mattress went soft and I woke up on the ground with my hip complaining. This year we finally switched to an Elegear 5.5-inch double sleeping pad, and honestly, I wish we had done it years ago.
I am not a gear reviewer who sleeps in a hammock on a cliff for fun. I am a dad from outside Ogden, Utah, and we do state park and national forest camping in Utah, Idaho, and Wyoming, all of it drive-up car camping with one Ford Expedition packed to the roof. What I know is what works when you have five kids, one vehicle, and a low tolerance for problems on day two of a trip. Here are ten reasons the double sleeping pad beat the air mattress for us.
One swap that fixed our worst camping nights
The Elegear double sleeping pad sleeps two, packs small, and holds air all night. It is the single change that made the biggest difference to our trips this year, and the air mattresses have not come out of the garage since.
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Every air mattress we owned developed a sag down the center. By 3 a.m. one of us was wedged against the other, both fighting for the high ground. The Elegear pad is 5.5 inches thick and stays flat from the first night to the last. Jenna and I now wake up in the same spots we fell asleep in, which sounds like a small thing until you have spent a week sleeping sideways.
No more 2 a.m. deflation wake-ups
I can count on one hand the camping trips that went by without re-inflating the air mattress at least once. Slow leaks, seam creaks, the valve that never quite sealed. Two seasons in, the Elegear pad has not gone soft once. Not one night. The old mattress had a patch on a patch by the end of its life, and I still did not trust it for a full week. For a family that camps a week at a stretch, that alone was worth the switch.
You stay warmer on cold nights
An air mattress is a balloon full of cold air. Whatever heat your body puts down disappears into that void, and the cold ground pulls at you from below. A double sleeping pad keeps that from happening. On a 38-degree night in Wyoming last September, Jenna and I slept warm while the kids spent the night burrowed into their sleeping bags. The difference showed up the next morning in who was ready for coffee and who was still shivering.
It gives you back the trunk
Five kids and a week of food fill an Expedition fast. The old air mattress took up a third of the cargo area even when it was rolled up. The Elegear double pad folds down to a bundle about the size of a camp chair, which means we fit the whole trip in the car instead of strapping half of it to the roof. The rooftop box is for the stuff we do not touch until we get there. I measured it once out of curiosity, but the real test was packing the car without playing gear Tetris for an hour.
Setup takes minutes, not a wrestling match
The air mattress routine was: unpack, find the pump, find the adapter, hold the valve just right, and fight the last few inches of air while the kids circled asking when dinner was ready. The Elegear goes down flat in about the time it takes to get a fire going, and it sets up without the pump and adapter routine, so there is nothing to lose under the tent floor. We have camp set up in under twenty minutes now, which matters when you pull in after dark.
No hunting for a power source
Most of the campgrounds we use do not have hookups. That meant the air mattress pump ran off the car battery, which meant the car had to be running, which meant someone had to remember to start it before the battery died. The Elegear inflates without me standing around holding a valve and shouting over a pump motor. One less thing to plan around, and one less thing for the kids to argue about.
It is quiet, so the kids actually sleep
Every air mattress we ever owned crinkled like a bag of chips every time someone rolled over. In a tent, that sound travels. The kids would stir, then wake, then the whole tent was awake. The double pad is noticeably quieter. I can get up to check on the kids at midnight and Jenna does not even shift. It is the difference between a campsite that calms down at night and one that never quite does.
Your back gets a fair deal
I am 44 and I have spent a lot of nights on the ground pretending it was fine. Air mattresses feel fine at 10 p.m. and punishing by 6 a.m. because they do not support anything. The firmer surface of the double pad keeps my hips and lower back in a better position. I have stopped waking up with that stiff lower back feeling on the second morning of a trip. That alone has made the difference between a trip I recover from and one I need a vacation from.
It survives more than one season
We went through air mattresses like we went through camp fuel. Seams split, patches peeled, and by the third trip most of them were done. The Elegear has done two full seasons, a week-long road trip through Idaho and Montana, and a dozen weekend trips, and it still holds air. Two seasons is not a lifetime, but it has already outlived every air mattress we owned.
The kids will claim it
On rainy afternoons, the double pad becomes the reading spot, the nap spot, and the headquarters for whatever game the kids invented that day. The teenagers have claimed it for the tent floor more than once. On the last trip, the 12-year-old asked if we could leave it out instead of packing it away. That is the highest compliment camping gear gets in our family. A piece of gear that gets used at camp instead of just carried there is earning its space in the trunk.
What I'd Skip
Honestly, this pad is not for everyone. If you backpack into your campsite, the double pad is too heavy and too bulky to carry. If you have trouble getting down to and up from ground level, you will want a cot or a taller mattress. And if you need a real bed, a pad is not that. It is a pad, not a bed. For our kind of camping, which is drive-up, family-sized, and gear-heavy, it is the right trade.
Two seasons in, the Elegear pad has not gone soft once. The air mattresses it replaced were retired by August.
Give your next trip a better night's sleep
If you are still waking up on the ground at 2 a.m., the Elegear double sleeping pad is the fix. It is the camping upgrade that pays for itself in better sleep alone, and it packs small enough to take on every trip.
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