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Monday, December 10, 2007

Using Air Mattresses

I used to love camping when I was a child. I never minded sleeping in a sleeping bag for several days. As I've gotten older, I've discovered that my body just isn't made like it used to be. My idea of roughing it in the great outdoors consists of either renting a cabin somewhere or having an air mattress in a very large tent. I'd much rather sleep in a bed in a rented cabin, but an air mattress is second best. After carefully shopping for a comfortable air mattress, which I didn't think existed, we did manage to find one. The most wonderful part of it is that it comes with a tiny pump that inflates the air mattress within minutes. The air mattress sits about a foot off of the ground, so you don't get the dampness of the ground when you're sleeping. There's nothing worse than waking up and feeling damp and wet. I never used to mind it but apparently my body gets aches and pains when it is damp. The joys of getting older.

We found our comfortable air mattress at Eastern Mountain Sports. While they had lots of different types of air mattresses, we chose this one to suit our needs the best. The salespeople were incredibly helpful. There were many other stores in which we had found a particular air mattress that we liked but most of those stores did not have any sales reps on hand to help us. We ended up paying a tiny bit more for the air mattress but it was worthwhile because of having the personalized assistance. I was absolutely amazed that the air mattress that we chose came in such a small box. It didn't seem possible. But, the clerk handed us a rather small box which supposedly included the air mattress and the pump. I almost laughed but the look on his face told me that he was serious. How could a queen sized large air mattress fit into such a small box? It did though.
So, we headed off with my brother and his wife for a weekend of camping. After pitching our tent and clearing away all of the rocks, we set up our campsite for the weekend. About an hour before it started to get dark, I decided that we should inflate the air mattress. Much to our surprise and delight, the air mattress inflated fully within two minutes. The salesman was right. I climbed into bed that night, moving around a bit more than expected on the air mattress, but slept very comfortably. I only smiled the next morning when I heard others complaining about having slept poorly in their sleeping bags. miscellaneous

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