I upgraded to one of these fancy next-gen sleeping mats about five years ago, when I had a cross-country motorcycle camping trip in the works. I had to justify the price to myself by comparing it to a one-night stay in a moderately-priced (okay, nicer than where I usually stay) hotel, but over thousands of miles and hundreds of campsites, the Exped has proved it worth it. I remember well the jealousy in another camper\u2019s voice after the night we pitched our tents in a gravel parking lot near the start of the Trans-Labrador Highway. He didn\u2019t get much sleep, but I was just fine. In a pinch it even works an an indoor air mattress for guests.<\/p>\n
They have different styles of these now, but I have the Synmat UL 7 (UL stands for ultralight, which I believe means if has less insulation, but it’s still good to 24.8 degrees F, according to the packaging). It inflates to 2.8 inches and packs down to the size of a one-liter bottle, so it\u2019s both lighter and more compact than the older, torso-only, \u201cself-inflating\u201d style I used to use. Oh, a word about that \u2014 it\u2019s pretty easy to inflate the Exped by blowing it up, even a 25-year (now former) smoker like me could manage it without much difficulty, but I did add the Exped pillow-pump<\/a> a year or so ago, because that\u2019s also very small, and blowing it up night after night is, frankly, a bit of a chore. I believe they have a stuff sack that works as a pump as well.<\/p>\n Since I got this, these types of mats have become more common, but what really made me want to write this review was that I used it recently on a car-camping trip with my nephews, and one of the interior baffles popped, leaving a lump at one end. Not the end of the mat, but annoying, and I started pricing replacements. As a last-ditch effort to save my longtime companion (and a few buck), I emailed Exped, and asked whether it could be fixed. After a brief explanation and a photo of the damage, they told me that they couldn\u2019t fix it, so they\u2019d send me a replacement, free of charge. I just got it in the mail, and I\u2019m hoping to break it in soon. It’s great to see an outdoor innovation that lives up to its hype, and a company that stands behind its gear.<\/p>\n Sleeping pad with synthetic micro-fiber filling<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":76,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[86],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tkdev.kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26903"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tkdev.kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tkdev.kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tkdev.kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/76"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tkdev.kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26903"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tkdev.kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26903\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26905,"href":"https:\/\/tkdev.kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26903\/revisions\/26905"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tkdev.kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26903"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tkdev.kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26903"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tkdev.kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26903"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}