My Review of Big Agnes Insulated Air Core Mummy Pad - Regular

Originally submitted at REI

This insulated Big Agnes pad is so light you'll never tire of carrying it, and so comfortable you may need an alarm clock!

Big Agnes Insulated Air Core Mummy Pad - Regular

Nice, but too narrow

By gregnx from Fort Worth, TX on 2/23/2012

 

2out of 5

Pros: Packs Easily, Lightweight, Easy To Inflate, Small / Compact

Cons: Uncomfortable

Best Uses: Backpacking

Describe Yourself: Casual/ Recreational

What Is Your Gear Style: Comfort Driven

Was this a gift?: No

Nice mattress. Inflates easily (see video) in about 2 minutes (20 breaths). Unfortunately I had to return it as I found the 20" width was just too narrow. I sleep on my back most of the time, and my arms kept sliding off of the edges.

With the black side up it's supposed to be cooler, with the red side up the insulation hangs down and provides more thermal insulation.

I ended up needing to remove some of the air in order to be most comfortable. My body never slid off.

I might be able to make the 25" wide version work for me, but trying other 25" mattresses in the store was still not quite wide enough to make me want to try their (more expensive) B.A. 25".

Inflation time lapse

Tags: Air, Mattress, Picture of Product, Neoair, REI, Cabelas, Thermarest, Camping, Made with Product

(legalese)

Arizona's Desert Gets Hot, and Other Understatements

The '52 Buick Super 8. Oh yeah.

A project car if there ever was one. It needed an engine, engines need motor mounts, motor mounts come with frames. So the best thing we could come up with was a 1973 Chevy truck frame, cut down to fit inside the body of the Buick.

This lifted the car pretty good. Something up that high deserves a cherry glow, so a few cans of light grey primer and it was all set for a paint job... that never came. Ever.

But it looked pretty awesome.

The windows were able to roll down, and the doors worked. The paneling inside was pretty wore out, and the seat fabric ended up getting covered by horse blankets. Maybe the AM radio worked.

It was sturdy enough to tow a travel trailer, both the boxy type and a popup trailer. The popup came in handy as we camped by the side of the road for extended trips. The big one ended up being my bedroom one summer where I got to listen to Larry King's radio show and found out about Sig-alerts from the KNX 1070AM California radio station.

But I digress. Another pertinent detail is that my dad was interested

in the road less travelled. (Currently his fascination is Route 66 and all of the old, old-old, and old-old-old sections that the current highways have bypassed.) So we would tend to take the side highways rather than the interstate.  You could see how he really enjoys theme and story elements of the movie Cars.

For this episode, we had increased the family size with another sister, maintaining the dog. Taking interesting trips to New Mexico and So. Cal. As mentioned in Snow Days, we would leave from Flagstaff (7,000 feet, rather cool).  Heading south into the Phoenix area, we travel part of one of the interesting features of Arizona: you can start at nearly 13,000 feet in elevation and go to near sea level traveling through numerous climate and vegetation zones, all within the borders of the state. I think my 9th grade Biology teacher said Arizona is the only state that has this many zones in its borders.

Anywho, we tended to end up in the desert region, essentially the bottom half of the state, and most of New Mexico, and parts of California.

 Let's see where we're at.


Dad is cheap, we drive a cobbled together Frankenstein's monster of a jalopy stuffed with a family of 5 including pet, tow a rectangular gas mileage-killing anchor behind us, in the desert, where it's hot. So hot, in fact, that the car overheats. If you've seen Gumball Rally, you know that the way to fix an overheating car is to turn on the heater, full blast, in the desert, where it's hot. This takes the heat that would be dangerous to the engine and routes it to the passengers faces and feet. Of course, when it's hot inside the car, you open the windows (since the A/C wasn't purchased as an option for this 1952 chariot). This allows the 120 degree desert air to mix with the 300 degree engine heat to produce a blast of air that idiots would call "balmy".

 For some reason this wasn't working (i.e. keeping us from complaining), so we broke out two handy items to ease our mild discomfort. The first was a "water cooler". This modern marvel was truly an amazing invention. One would be hesitant to imagine that a slighlty porous canvas bag filled with water, and then hung on the front of this vehicle could cool water just by travelling through the desert at a highway pace. And this clever individual would be right. It doesn't work, it doesn't cool the water, it tastes like you've filtered the water through an Army tent, and that's when you've drank it soon enough after filling it so that it hasn't leaked and evaporated until empty.

Next invention, perhaps from the same geniuses that invented the magic water bag, was the window-mounted air cooler. It looked like a rocket motor with 50's Jetson's styling. Now, my HOA doesn't allow window units because they look bad, but the desert VOA either doesn't police these sections of roads or they don't exist. So we gave it a try.

For this to work, you have to mount it to the passenger window, and everyone else's windows have to be closed. This allows the air forced through the mini turbine to blow through another reservoir of water, pushing that air through a tiny little slit and distributing the frigid air to the interior of the cabin. You probably see where this is going, it didn't work. But we sweated it out while we gave it a chance, which was the instruction from the front seat; for several hours.

The passengers are hot, the car is hot, and we need to make this travel trailer slice through the air to help us get where we're going more quickly. So we do what any normal family does: we remove the hood of the '52 Buick and strap it to the front of the towed trailer. Engine gets more air, trailer gains the aerodynamic profile of a stealth fighter, fuel mileage rivals a Prius.

I think I passed out around this time, because I don't have any recollection of whether this REALLY improved our gas mileage. My memory picks up as we continue the drive at night, when the textbooks report that the desert is cooler.

Don't believe everything that you read in books. Unfortunately, the photos below don't come close to replicating these adventures, but you get the idea.

Northern Lights

Ran across this picture of the current Aurora Borealis.  This shows what aurora activity is happening as of the last time the satellite flew by.  With all of the recent sun storm activity, the northern lights are supposed to be spectacular.

Links: http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/pmap/

Breakdowns, but Expected

I grew up with old cars. My dad seemed to enjoy working on them, knowing how they worked, knowing how to fix them, knowing a LOT about them. 

Once we tested him at night and found he was able to determine the make and model of several oncoming cars just from the headlights or taillights.

Not a Really Old Car

Growing up with someone like that, you're bound to wind up with a few interesting vehicles that pick you up from school. Like the yellow 1960s multi-door limousine, the white "short bus" with the big vertical doors, or the 1930s something that was so old-fashioned that you could see the oily guts of the engine by flipping up a panel on the side.

Quite a few fairly normal cars showed up as well. A handful of 1970s Cadillacs, a 1974 Chevy Impala, even a few new Hondas.

Travelling in most of these older vehicles involved blankets for the cold weather if the heater didn't work, a crank-open window for trips through the desert if the A/C didn't work ("It's 4-60 A/C: four windows, 60 miles per hour!"), and a steady gaze straight ahead to not get motion sickness by ignoring the road you could see flying by through the floorboards underneath your feet.

We were heading to California one day, I don't think it was a Snow Day, when we pull over near a thriving community called Seligman.

Not Anywhere in Arizona

"What's up?" Of course,  in preteen language this question came out more like a complaint than a query. But it's my story.

"Well, I think it's the alternator."  So, given what we know about my dad at this point, this doesn't seem strange. Perhaps this will be the first time that we'll have to use a tow service, or maybe we'll all take turns winding wire into coils to repair this piece of equipment.

He doesn't seem too annoyed and I found his calm demeanor rather odd. While my sister walked around outside with the dog, I went around to the back of the car where my dad was moving stuff out of the trunk.

Out comes the toolbox.  Good, so we're making progr....

Out comes an alternator. From the trunk. A spare alternator.

"Uh, dad, why did you just happen to bring an extra alternator?" Even at this age I know normal people don't carry a spare alternator.

"Well, I had a feeling it might go out for a while now."

In another 45 minutes we're on the road.

So that's the story, we break down an hour into our trip, we install the replacement part, and keep going.

A Spare Radiator?

I'm not sure if that's the same trip where the radiator blew while climbing the hills in So. Cal., having to spend the  night near a junk yard. I think THAT trip was the same one where a tire went flat, we didn't have a working spare, we got to wake up the Tire Repair Service guy, and my dad still seemed to complain about the cost.  

But I can't really remember, I guess I'm trying to block it all out.

Snow Day Vacations

Lots of people think that their family took vacations that rival National Lampoon's Vacation movie.


I recall when they filmed a small portion of that movie in Flagstaff, where I grew up.

I'll describe my stories and leave it to the reader to decide how mine stack up.

Snow Days
In Flag, and other towns that get snow, they have Snow Days for schools. Of course, residents of any place that has weather different than San Diego will scoff at another town cancelling school for a certain inch-level of snow, but let's put that argument aside and just say that when Flagstaff public schools cancelled school due to snow, there was enough snow to hamper parents and buses getting their kids safely to and fro.

My dad's parents lived in Southern California, near the beach.

Why did I place that sentence there? No reason.

When school is cancelled, there is rampant celebration by everyone, except parents. When it's cancelled for snow, kids like to play outside. They come inside for hot chocolate and sit by the wood stove.

Many of our cars we had growing up had poorly working heaters (again, no particular reason for that sentence showing up).

Of course there are two ideal snow days. One on the day of the big test or assignment; the other on a Friday, and maybe Monday.

Three day weekends are popular with all ages. In fact, they're such a surprise that it's exciting to wake up and BEGIN planning what you're going to do with all of this time you've just been gifted with.

Putting it all together, a Thursday or Friday snow day resulted in a harried early morning scramble to load the family of six into the designated 1950-something cobbled transport "system", complete with blankets and dog (heaters) in order to get on the road to see Grandma and Grandpa.  Of course, this being a snow day, the "road" was covered in 2 inches of hard pack snow, with blizzard conditions ensuring that no one in the vehicle could properly gauge the snow depth. It only took an hour or two of white knuckle yelling at the other idiots on the road to get down beneath the snow line and into the desert on the way to the beach.

We never had a snow-related accident.

How Not to Remove A Swallowed Fish Bone

Cheaper than a doctor visit without health insurance. Even with the plane ticket.

A whole fish
I've always found an entire cooked fish in a little bowl an interesting menu item in a work cafeteria.

There's plenty of other dishes that are interesting in their own right: beggar's chicken, sichuan chicken, pig brain.

Yet the little fish staring up at you, even as its skeleton is still intact, has an appeal that made me eat at least one per work trip.

I do enjoy fishing and like to eat them occasionally.  I take great care to remove those tiny little bones. But when in China, as I am straining to understand the accent and conversation, I have always swallowed a bone or two.  Luckily on my first trip and bone, I received some good instruction to eat a bunch of rice afterwards to help glom onto it to prevent problems later.
.
"Hangzhou, we have a problem."
So this lunch was like any other. Grab a fish, some vegetables that I don't recognize, and a Coke. Sit down and talk to a colleague. Then it happened.

Now, every time I suck a bone down the gullet, I recall learning that mountain lions can eat porcupines. They apparently "roll" any quills that they ingest down their throat to ensure an injury free kill.

I still don't understand how my eighth grade teacher could believe that it works like that.

I felt it on the back of my tongue. Being enthralled in the conversation and aware of the custom to cover your mouth while using a toothpick, I didn't want to try recovering the bone right then.

So, in goes the rice.

Success! Almost.  The bone shifted down another inch, well past the point of me being able to recover it.

The conversation got a little slow, I can't even remember what we were talking about. I happened to mention what was going on, and one of the Chinese insisted that I needed to go to the hospital. "The hospital is not very far and it's very important to be sure you're OK."

After a few minutes of downing more rice and trying to remember about throat physiology from my kids' "Uncover the Human Body" book, I ended up giving in and agreeing to go to the hospital.

2 girls, a guy and a taxi
Turns out, when Americans are this dumb and helpless, no expense is spared. Within 10 minutes a car was downstairs. I got into it and waited on the coworker to whisk me to what I hoped was really a hospital rather than a traditional chinese medicine facility.

Was I in for a treat. I got to share this experience with two girls I had never met. One was a good English speaker but unfamiliar with hospitals, the other knew her way around the hospital but couldn't speak English.

With my embarrassment piqued, we headed out and just 5 minutes later we got dumped off at a nice looking building.  The central atrium and multiple floors looked rather inviting.  We went to stand in line at the reception counter. It was only five people deep.

It's how much?
National healthcare is a hot button topic in the States. We always hear about about how Canada and European countries have superior systems. At least in some respects, by some "investigators".

Well, I don't recall anyone ever mentioning Chinese healthcare.

A visit to the Ear Nose Throat specialist, prepaid, ran me about $1.25.  Yes, less than $2.

We traveled upstairs to sit in the waiting area.  But, my helper familiar with hospitals mistakenly took us to the dentist. Once we sorted this out, we made it to the ENT room.

EEEEEEEE
We are called in to the room.  One patient is already there with the older doctor.  The younger doctor is free, so I sit down.  Translations ensue, and I am introduced to that thing that Bugs Bunny wears on his head when he's acting like a doctor.

I found out that it's used to reflect light from a lamp near my head, down into my throat.

In goes a dental mirror, attempting to peer down into my throat using the light and reflector, except she's a little timid.  Here's where I learned something interesting.  She kept making a high pitched noise at me.  It sounded like "EEEEEEEE".  After a few times, I got the point.  This was the equivalent of "Ahhhhh".  Whether this was an advanced technique or just the way they do it over there, I don't know. I started doing it on command.

Still no luck.  With the other patient done, or at least bored of my foreign antics, I got passed up to the apparently more experienced doctor.  New seat, new batch of dental mirrors pulled from what I hope was sanitizing fluid, and a new twist. This older lady decided that I needed to stick out my tongue, but was too cool to demonstrate it.  Translation ensued, and I stuck my tongue out.  This is where her experience really shined through.  Before I knew what was happening, she had grabbed a little cloth and wrapped my tongue in it, yanking it out of joint, acted as if this was perfectly normal, and made me "EEEEEEE". And stuck a dental mirror down my throat.

Not once, but three times.

Still no luck. All the while they're asking me if I still feel the bone, and I explain that I can and that it seems to be moving around a little bit.

So then come the forceps. While she's jamming these pliers down my throat and shoving around whatever it is that sits just 2 inches above my stomach, she makes me "EEEEEEE".  Except I only get half of it out before my gag reflex kicks in, she withdraws her hand and tool, and nods to the floor by my side.  This is when I notice another feature of the room that had escaped my previous inspection, a conveniently placed puke bucket.

Not once, but three times.

Disgusted that she won't make international news by removing the fishbone from the American's throat, she dismissed me and instructs me to have an X-ray. She couldn't find anything in my esophagus.

Eat the Ball 
Since getting zapped with X-rays is a new service, we have to pay again. $1.60. Less than 2 dollars (I'm repeating this so you don't think I've misplaced the decimal point).  What kind of X-ray is this?

Down to the level beneath the ground floor.  Into a room with large sliding doors on either side of the room, some equipment to the right, a technician window, and what I assume are lead aprons on the wall. Of course I'll be wearing one of those later, right?

Another slightly odd Chinese thing that I ran across on a prior trip was being offered hot water on a cold day.  Nothing in it, and not necessarily Evian, but steaming.

I really didn't think it strange to see the X-ray doctor with a Styrofoam cup of steaming water on the counter in front of him.  I just figured he was going to drink it or make some tea while he laughed about my experience with my translator.  He took a bag out of a drawer.  It wasn't a tea bag, it was a plastic bag that looked like it had medical-type writing on it.  He put a couple of spoonfuls of white powder from the bag into the hot water, then stirred. No alarm bells yet.

Then he grabbed a cotton ball from another bag and dunked it into the cup. Ding!

He mixed it up, making sure that the cotton had soaked up plenty of the milky fluid, then handed it to my translator and directed us into the X-ray room and closed the heavy doors.

She told me I had to hold this cup. So I did.  I asked what I was to do with this cup, and she waved me off, paying attention to the doctor and his eager technicians behind the glass.

The doctor spoke some instructions into audio system in the room, and my translator told me to step up onto a platform. In front of me was an oversized version of what my dentist uses to shoot pictures of my teeth.  Over my translator's shoulder I could see the lead aprons hanging on the wall. Perhaps the aprons were protecting some film canisters on hidden shelving....

"Eat the ball."

"Now see, that's what I was wondering about...."  I literally cocked my head to the side and did that eye thing that expresses something between disgust and fear.  I snickered slightly while using the spoon to find the soaked cotton ball in the bottom of the cup, and started to question various life-choices I've made over the years.  I put the cotton ball in my mouth.

I don't know if you've ever tried to eat a cotton ball.  This was a first for me, but I did what you do when you eat something, I tried to chew it.  I immediately realized that I couldn't break down a cotton ball by chewing on it, so I just choked it down.

Then she told me to drink it.  While I drank this elixir, the X-ray element passed up and down in front of me.  Fluid gone, I waited for the white sludge at the bottom of the cup to work its way into my mouth. Luckily they quickly announced the All Clear.  One of the techs grabbed the microphone and tried out his Crazy English , "All Done!"

The X-ray doc explained that he couldn't see anything, and thought that the bone had probably passed into my gut and I was just feeling the injury of the jabs.  I should feel better shortly.

And I did; the next day I couldn't feel anything except the palpable scorn of my coworkers as I walked back into the office.

So, a trip to a hospital, two ENT specialists, a set of X-rays, and a souvenir "chart" ran me less than three bucks. I thought about submitting a claim on my health insurance just to see what would happen, but I want to hang on to the receipt.


Links:
Cover your mouth while using a toothpick
Crazy English

How to Set Up the REI Half Dome 2 Plus Tent, with a Time Lapse

Another time lapse from my phone. One person setting it up.  Note the top hub design that spreads the wall poles apart to get the near-vertical walls.

I use the REI footprint for the floor saver, coated (shiny) side up. I had to remove some forest material to prevent sharp items from stabbing through. Orienting the footprint, tent, rain fly, and poles is helped with color coded anchor straps.

Setting up the poles with one person isn't that tough now that I've done it a few times.  It's amazing how the aluminum poles bend so much, and getting that top hub piece in place takes quite a bit of bending in two directions.

Putting up the actual tent is as simple as clipping to the poles, rather than pushing the poles through sleeves. This is a time saver in setup as well as tear down.

The rain fly straps attach underneath the ground cloth straps, then the fly just cinches up at the corners to make sure it's taut.

There was a rain chance, so I spent some time on getting the rain fly tied in properly. This involved making sure the hook and loop tape on the underside was attached to the outside corners of the pole structure and staking out the ends.

Note the vent at the top of the rain fly, with another one on the other side. This consists of a stiff piece that attaches either closed or open. The rain (and cool weather) wasn't coming for a few days, so I started with it open.

The pink visibility tape on the fly guy wires was my first quick attempt at helping people see the black string. I am getting close to an economical solution that ensures daytime and nighttime visibility. More later.

I have switched out the stakes that come with the tent for some Coghlan's three-sided stakes. I have found the ground where I camp the most is too hard for the aluminum pegs that come with the tent (though not this time).  Go here for an excellent discussion and comparison of tent stakes. 

These tents are a nice purchase for backpacking gear if you need the space. One person fits in it great with lots of room for equipment that can stay in the tent with you.  For housing two people it has plenty of room with backpacking sleeping pads, given that the rain fly entrances on either side are spacious enough for packs and shoes to keep the inside free for sleeping.