The Trip That Ended My Sleeping Pad Era

The trip that ended it for me was a three night stay at a state forest campground about ninety minutes from home, the kind of drive-in site where you back the truck almost to the fire ring. Same tent I'd used for years, same stove, same routine. The one thing I hadn't touched since I got back into camping in my thirties was the pad I slept on, a self-inflating foam pad with a slow leak I kept patching with the little glue kit from the box. I told myself it still worked fine. It did not, and that trip is the reason there's an ABORON cot in the truck bed on every trip since.

I've had lower back trouble since a herniated disc from framing work in my twenties, and at home a firm mattress keeps it quiet without me thinking about it. Something about a pad slowly losing air at three in the morning while my hip settles onto packed dirt underneath turns a quiet back into a loud one fast. I get into the long version of how that held up over a full season in the ABORON cot review, but this is the story of the one bad night that sent me looking for a fix in the first place.

That pad went from half full to completely flat sometime between my last check around midnight and when I woke up at 2:47am with my hip essentially resting on a root through an inch of foam. I patched it in the dark with a headlamp clenched in my teeth, reinflated it by mouth until I felt lightheaded, and got maybe ninety more minutes of real sleep before it started getting light out. My wife Denise slept through the whole thing. She always does.

By the time coffee was ready the next morning I'd already decided this was the last trip I'd spend sleeping on an inflatable pad. I wasn't after anything fancy, just something that got me off the ground completely, held my weight without a second thought (I'm 220 pounds and holding steady, if not gaining), and didn't require me to blow into a valve like a pool toy at a kid's birthday party.

What I landed on after a week of reading reviews was the ABORON XXL cot, mostly because the listing didn't oversell itself and a 900 pound weight rating meant I could stop thinking about capacity entirely. It showed up a few days later, and I set it up once in the garage just to learn the legs before trusting it at a real campsite.

I didn't need a softer bed. I needed to stop sleeping on the ground entirely.

The first night on it, I noticed the difference before I'd even fallen asleep. There's no cold radiating up from the ground because you're not touching the ground, you're suspended close to a foot above it on taut fabric stretched over a steel frame. My hip didn't have one spot to complain about because the whole cot flexes slightly under weight instead of bottoming out against a root or a rock.

We've taken that cot on close to a dozen trips since, everything from a quick two-nighter forty minutes from the house to a full week at higher elevation where the ground stayed cold well past sunrise. I put together a longer breakdown stacking it directly against a pad in camping cot versus sleeping pad, if you want the side-by-side, but the short version is I slept through an entire night for the first time in longer than I want to admit.

My daughter Mia tried it once at a campsite and asked why she didn't have one. She got one for her birthday two months later. I've laid out where the ABORON cot still falls short, because it does, in the honest review where I get into the packed size. This is not a backpacking item and I've never once claimed it was.

If you're driving your gear in rather than carrying it six miles on your back the way we do, that tradeoff is an easy one to make. It doesn't fit in a stuff sack you clip to a pack, but it fits in the bed of a truck or the back of an SUV without a second thought, which is exactly where ours lives now between trips.

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

If you asked me straight out whether it's worth it, I'd tell you what I tell anyone who wanders by our site while I'm setting it up. I'm not chasing memory foam or a perfect night's sleep, I'm a guy who wanted to stop waking up at three in the morning with a flat pad and a sore hip, and the ABORON cot fixed exactly that problem and nothing more dramatic than that. If cold nights are part of your trips too, I put together some extra steps in how to sleep warm on a camping cot that pair well with it. It isn't a miracle upgrade. It's just the last piece of gear I stopped overthinking, and the reason I mean it when I say I'll never sleep on the ground at camp again.