The Best Overlanding Bed Ever (that we've tried)
Obviously, everyone has a different opinion about what results in the perfect night’s sleep. There are so many factors that come into play. So when I say I found the perfect bed solution for our rooftop tent, it really means this is the best solution I’ve developed so far. Always room for improvement?
The iKamper Skycamp 2.0 came with an upgraded mattress from their original model. It reminds me of our therapeutic dog bed, but a little thinner. Before our road trip, we took the car up to the cabin for a weekend to do a test run on everything. If any of you follow us on Instagram, you may have seen all the disasters that ensued that weekend. I learned a lot! One of those things was that I was gonna need to replace the bed. For a night or two, it was fine. For two months, I would need something more substantial.
FIRST ATTEMPT
I started with some research on the iKamper Facebook community page. It has been a super helpful place to connect with other overlanders and share tips and hacks. A quick search found that most had the same desire to come up with a comfortable sleeping solution. The overwhelming answer was to invest in two Exped air mattresses. We went to REI and I didn’t get the hype. They were super expensive and felt like air mattresses to me. Not what I wanted.
I was obviously smarter than all those folks and knew I could make a cheaper and better solution. I purchased a 1” foam topper from Amazon that was still short enough to fit in the closed iKamper along with the existing mattresses. We took off for our next test run weekend. Guess, what. I was wrong again. I’m a side sleeper and my hip and neck was killing in the morning. Not to mention that one of the kids peed in the tent the second night so the foam was now covered in urine. Sweet. Toss that money down the toilet.
SECOND ATTEMPT
Lots of more research and we ended up back where we started. REI. It happened to be one of their big members weekends and we got the Expeds on sale. I think it is just a coincidence but the double wide mat and XL single fit together to fill the interior of the iKamper perfectly. I was super skeptical about this solution but packed up with my favorite sheet and our new Voited blankets. We needed bedding that could all completely fit in the closed iKamper and cover our needs from 40F to 100F. Not an easy task.
Despite my hesitations, this solution was pretty magical. It took us a few nights to figure out how much to inflate each of the mattresses to balance out having all four (or three) of us on it. Once we did, we slept like babies. We removed the factory mattress and added perforated foam tiles to the floor of the tent to handle condensation. It also made for a much more comfortable surface for when we were inflating mattresses. The Expeds supposedly inflate themselves but we normally had to finish it off with the hand pump that came with it. We bought a battery powered pump that broke halfway through the summer and didn’t work nearly as well as the manual method. The longest part of setting up and taking down the tent is definitely the mattresses. However, once we got the rhythm it went pretty quickly.
Each person had their own Voited blanket since each of us liked different amounts of warmth to sleep. These blankets are not only cute, but they have a nifty feature where they can be snapped together to create a continuous blanket. It comes in two weights, Ripstop and CloudTouch. The CloudTouch has a fleece lining one side while Ripstop has ripstop on both sides. Most of us preferred the cuddliness of the CloudTouch and didn’t like sliding off the lighter Ripstop blankets. However, they all got used nightly. We used the REI foam travel pillows all summer. They are very comfortable but come at the expense of space. We ended up storing them inside the car and sometimes that got cumbersome.
OUR FINAL BED SETUP
Field and Stream Campsite Flooring Tiles $20/6 tiles
Exped MegaMat price varies by size
Target Vintage Percale Sheets $36/full set
Voited Blankets $119/cloudtouch $89/ripstop
REI Co-op Trailbreak Foam Pillow $20/regular $25/large
