The Sleeping Pad That Fixed Our Camping Nights

I have five kids, a Ford Expedition that is always packed to the ceiling, and a rooftop cargo box full of everything we forgot to pack. For about twelve summers now, my wife Jenna and I have loaded all of it into the car and driven to state parks and national forest campgrounds across Utah, Idaho and Wyoming. I love the trips. What I do not love is the second night, when the air mattress my wife and I share has gone soft and I wake up on the tent floor with my hip digging into the ground. That was our routine for years. Last summer I finally replaced the air mattress with the Elegear double sleeping pad, and it changed more than my sleep. It changed how I feel about the whole trip.

Let me back up. For years we used a queen air mattress that took up half the tent and a battery pump that ran out of power at 11 pm. It slept fine on the first night, sort of, and then it leaked slowly through the second night until we were both lying on the ground with a layer of sagging vinyl under us. I patched it twice with the repair kit that came with it, and one year I bought a second mattress from the same brand, hoping for better luck. It leaked the same way by the second night, which is when I stopped trusting the brand name entirely. At a forest service campground in Wyoming last July, I woke up at 2 am with my hip on the dirt and the kids' flashlights still moving around the tent. I lay there and decided something had to change. The kids woke up bouncing. I woke up feeling like I had been hit by a truck.

I read about the Elegear double sleeping pad in a camping group before our annual road trip last year. The idea of a thick inflatable pad sounded good in theory, but I have learned to be suspicious of anything that promises to fix camping sleep. I ordered one anyway, because the price was reasonable and the reviews were specific. People talked about the five-and-a-half-inch thickness, about not feeling the ground, about actually sleeping through the night. It showed up two days before we left, and I inflated it in the living room to check for leaks. The kids immediately claimed it as a trampoline, which I took as a good sign. I left it inflated overnight in the hallway just to be sure it held air, and it did.

The first morning I woke up on the Elegear pad, I lay there for a minute trying to figure out why nothing hurt.

The first morning I woke up on the Elegear pad, I lay there for a minute trying to figure out why nothing hurt. That sounds dramatic, but after a decade of air mattress mornings, it was genuinely strange. My hips were fine. My back was fine. I was not stiff, not groggy, not already dreading the day. We were at a state park in Idaho, and I remember checking my phone, expecting it to be 6 am with my back already complaining. It was 7:40 and I had slept straight through. I actually nudged Jenna to ask if she had felt the ground at all during the night. She said no, and rolled over. That had never happened before. Jenna noticed the difference too. She sleeps on her side, which is the fastest way to find the weak spots in any mattress, and she stopped waking up at 3 am to flip over.

The pad is five and a half inches thick. That is the whole thing, really. It keeps you up off the ground with enough insulation and air that the cold doesn't seep through the way it did with the old air mattress. We used it in June at a state park in Idaho where the nights dipped into the 40s, and I slept warmer than I had on any camping trip in years. The coldest night came in September at a campground in Wyoming when it hit 38 degrees. I woke up once to pull a blanket over our youngest and went right back to sleep, which I never could have done on the old mattress. It also does not slide around the tent the way the air mattress did. The bottom grips the tent floor, which sounds like a small thing until you have spent a night chasing a mattress that slowly migrates toward the tent door.

Setting it up takes a few minutes with the pump. I am not going to pretend it inflates itself, but it is a lot closer to self-inflating than our old setup. I run the pump, walk away to help the kids find their shoes, and by the time I come back it is ready. The whole thing takes about four minutes, and the pump runs off the same power bank we use for our phones. Deflating in the morning is easy too. It rolls up tight enough to fit in the rooftop cargo box next to the camp chairs. That matters when you are trying to break camp with five kids who have all discovered a sudden interest in helping.

What I'd Tell You If We Were Sitting at My Kitchen Table

If we were sitting at my kitchen table, I would tell you this: if your camping sleep is the thing you dread most about a trip, fix that first. Better food, better gear, none of it matters if you are too tired to enjoy the fire. The Elegear double sleeping pad is not the cheapest thing in the camping aisle, but it is the one piece of gear I would buy again without thinking. It held up through a full summer of trips, it packs down small enough to fit in the trunk next to the cooler, and it turned the worst part of camping into one of the best parts. On cold nights, our youngest crawls in between us and sleeps through until morning, which never happened on the air mattress.