Sleeping arrangements

With my pri­ma­ry focus late­ly on fundrais­ing, train­ing and basi­cal­ly get­ting the word out there about my ride from Mel­bourne to Ade­laide for char­i­ty, it’s actu­al­ly been a nice diver­sion to con­tem­plate some­thing far sim­pler: where am I going to sleep each night?

Not want­i­ng to ‘waste’ mon­ey on prop­er accom­mo­da­tion that could be far bet­ter spent on the cause, and being an enthu­si­ast of the out­doors any­way, the obvi­ous answer for me has always been to camp rough in, or near, each town/stop on the jour­ney. So the next con­sid­er­a­tion quick­ly became weight and size to enable my camp­ing gear to be stowed on the bike or trailer.

I also did­n’t want to be sleep­ing on the ground each night, in the spring­time rain, only to then ride 100+ kilo­me­tres dur­ing the day and sleep again on the ground. It’s with this in mind that I first start­ed con­tem­plat­ing a sim­ple ham­mock and tarp set­up. After a lit­tle bit of research, I hap­pened across a great lit­tle gem whilst shop­ping in Mel­bourne at a store near Hard­ware Lane called Platat­ac. Platat­ac spe­cialise in ‘tac­ti­cal’ prod­ucts for law enforce­ment and mil­i­tary, but they also have some great light camp­ing prod­ucts — which makes sense as no Army sol­dier ever want­ed a heav­ier pack.

The Snug­pak Jun­gle Ham­mock fit­ted almost every require­ment that I had, so I took the plunge and part­ed with $80, then sprung anoth­er $100 for the Snug­pak All Weath­er Shel­ter light ground tarp to go with it.

I intend to prop­er­ly ‘field test‘ the set­up soon, so I can be sure it will be suf­fi­cient to my needs.

How does the Snugpak Jungle Hammock measure up?