I want to start this article by saying that I have made a lot of mistakes when it comes to sleeping well when camping. If you don’t get this right, it can really effect how you feel about camping in general so you really do want to figure this out, and early. Let me take you through what we got right, what we got wrong, and the products we chose along the way (please note that I am an Amazon Affiliate and if you click on a product image, I will get some really small amount of money if you buy anything on Amazon during a set period so that is a nice thing you can do).
I will start by saying that when we got the HC1, we always set it up at night to leverage 9 of the Adaptiv cube slots to configure a queen size bed. I still think it’s amazing that such a small rig can give you such a big sleeping space and then convert in the morning to a table and seating for breakfast. It’s one of the reasons I think Happier Campers are so unique and it’s still a favorite feature.
For those of you who haven’t seen one in person, the cube tops are cushioned and most people will use a combination of cubes, cube tops, tables and table top cushions to create the bed. To help you understand how that works, check out the picture on the left. First, notice how the some of the cushions have a seam down the middle and some don’t? If you don’t see a seam and it looks like just a square of material, that is a cube top. If you see a seam, like the three running through the middle, those are table top cushions. To create the queen bed, this person has used 6 cubes & 6 cube tops (3 at the top and 3 at the bottom), a single table top, a double table top and 3 sets of table top cushions (for the middle). If this sounds confusing, check out this video we did on setting up the bed. This set up will give you the flexibility of quickly moving from a bed at night to setting up tables in the morning with very little effort. And while the surface is fairly comfortable for sleeping, most people choose to get some kind of bed topper. Here is what our path to comfort looked like!
Our first attempt at a comfortable sleep started with using something we already had in the house. We had a down bed topper in a spare room and I thought this was going to be the perfect option for the camper. It was a queen size so I knew it was going to fit, plus if we were away camping there wouldn’t be anyone visiting and staying in the spare room. And while it worked, it wasn’t as comfortable as I needed. I think when a bed topper is on a mattress, you get a big benefit from what it’s sitting on and in this case, it was sitting on the cube covers so it was still too firm for what I needed. I want to caveat this point to say that for some people, this may be the perfect level of comfort, so don’t discount it - but read on because as I was soon to discover, it isn’t JUST about the comfort.
So to solve the problem of comfort, I bought another bed topper. This time I went for something more lux and because I’ve been trying to make decisions that cause the least amount of suffering for an animal (you don’t want to know how they get down for down products), I got this organic wool bed topper. Full disclosure, this was NOT inexpensive. But I also knew that if I didn’t figure out how to sleep comfortably in the camper, there was no point in actually having a camper to begin with. So I decided to spare no expense and if you are looking for a great product, I can fully vouch for how wonderful this is.
So now we were camping with two bed toppers - the down one and this wool one. Comfortable? Absolutely. Practical? Absolutely not. This is the point in my bed topper journey when I realized it wasn’t just about comfort, it was also about efficiency. And guess what? Traveling with two bed toppers is completely impractical. Have you ever tried to fold a bed topper to store it? Not happening - or not happening in a small camper for sure. We were either having to move the toppers into the car each morning so we could set up the interior of the camper with the tables or we would just leave the bed down and not bother. And THAT negated the whole value of the Adaptiv interior and having the flexibility to set up the camper however we would need it for that day. We needed a better option and as luck would have it, Happier Camper had apparently been thinking about this too.
At this point we were ready to upgrade from the HC1 to the HCT. We decided that our dog to human ratio and a desire to plan longer trips meant that a bigger rig made sense. And as we started to go through the purchase process, we learned that Happier Camper had developed a solution for a bed topper that I really just love. Their bed topper solves two problems - comfort and efficiency. From a comfort perspective, I was actually pretty shocked at how comfortable it is and that I didn’t feel like I needed any other support to get a good night’s sleep. But the efficiency is my favorite. part. The bed topper is actually two separate pieces. At night, you lay them together and connect with velcro to keep them from moving and separating. During the day, you roll up each piece individually and it acts as a bolster! I’ve got a video that shows this in more detail so check it out to get a feel for exactly how this works. And the story should in theory end here but there was something we hadn’t realized when we bought the HCT…
My original plan for sleeping in the HCT was that we would use the back of the camper for a bed, leave it down most of the time, and use the front part of the camper for sitting and eating. This would have worked just fine if it wasn’t for one small problem… The space in the back of the HCT doesn’t support a queen configuration, it supports a full size bed only. If it was only Mike and me, that would have been fine. But our 150 pound Newfoundland Charlie sleeps with us and there wasn’t any way that two humans, a Newf and a West Highland Terrier named Rose were going to sleep in a full size bed, so that meant we would need to leverage the front part for a bed at night as well. I will say that these are the moments where having the Adaptiv interior really shines. In any other rig, I think we would have been in trouble but because we can reconfigure our interior with ease, this wasn’t even a problem to solve. But we DID need to figure out what sort of topper Mike was going to sleep on since I would be in the back using the Happier Camper topper with Rose.
This is the first product we bought to try to solve for Mike’s sleeping situation. This is actually a VERY comfortable option. The mattress is 4” thick and it folds up and lays down very quickly. I think if we had young kids I would have a couple of these in the house for sleep overs, it was that comfortable. But the downside to this product is the same as we had with the original bed toppers, albeit less challenging. This folds up neatly into what is probably a 25” square that is about 12” deep. Is that impossibly large? Not at all. But is it this big block of a thing that has absolutely no other use during the day and just gets in the way? It sure is. I felt like we were almost back to square one with having this problem of solving for both efficiency and comfort so we tried another option.
Someone in our Facebook group had bought a Stoic camp pad and absolutely loved it, so we thought we would give it a try. And while it is pretty comfortable and it does roll up so you can put it away each morning, we still felt like we had this thing that didn’t have any other purpose except for sleeping on. I think that having had the Happier Camper bed topper and being able to use it as a sleeping surface during the day and a back bolster at night had really set an expectation for efficiency.
So you can guess what we landed on… yup, we bought another Happier Camper bed topper. And guys - these are not cheap. In fact, I almost didn’t buy the first one when we got the HCT because it just seemed like there should be a better option. But here is what I can tell you - I have spent more money swizzling on bed topper options than if I had just bought the HC version right away - not to mention the constant frustration with what to do with it during the day so we could get full use out of our rig. If you are handy with a sewing machine, creating your own topper/bolster combo is a real possibility. But for the rest of us, do yourself a favor and just get the Happier Camper version. I think you will realize pretty quickly how smart the design is and that it was worth the cost. Check out the video I posted on this topic here and drop in the comments below any options you think people should consider.
