THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, April 22, 1995 TAG: 9504220014
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A13 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Opinion
SOURCE: George Hebert
LENGTH: Medium: 53 lines
It's hard to say enough good things about sleeping bags.
Heavy-weight/light-weight versions (for colder/warmer situations) have been happy parts of the outdoor-camping scene for a lot of years. If adequate adjustments are made to deal with any underlying unevenness (an air mattress or perhaps just a pad), almost any terrain can be converted into a fine zonking-out spot.
Snug as a bug in a bag.
And just as snug, as well as super-convenient, is the sleeping bag as an in-house arrangement. That is, for adding temporary bed capacity in your own residence when guests exceed the usual sleeping accommodations, or for carrying with you on visits to other households with similar furniture limits.
Flopped down on reasonably soft carpeting (or even on a bare wood floor if the user is some rubber-boned youngster) or on a sofa or perhaps atop the sheets and blankets of a regular bed (avoiding muss now and laundering later), a sleeping bag is a marvelous way of adjusting nighttime living space.
But there's one catch.
After all the tidy, uncomplicated sleeping, somebody is stuck with the job of rolling up each bag - to dimensions demanded by automobile, plane or closet space. The challenge here is to restore the bag to its original compressed conformation.
This process usually requires one folding of the padded material lengthways, and then a rolling operation - with knees, arms and full body weight brought continuously into play, and with constant realignment of that long fold to prevent a total mess when the roll is ready for tying with those strings or tapes the manufacturer has provided.
The next step, that tying, is often more than one person can manage alone, since the bundle you've created is like a giant, coiled spring, threatening to bring into rumpled flatness, at any unguarded moment, everything you've accomplished.
Finally, if you do get the thing all rolled and tied, odds are the product is too fat and too misshapen to fit where it's supposed to fit - in cloth sheath or plastic bag or airline shipping box.
There may be no choice but to start over again. And again. And again.
I guess very few of our modern wonders come without a price. For somebody. MEMO: Mr. Hebert is a former editor of The Ledger-Star.
by CNB