Today’s pick for a great gift for the camping enthusiast… a sleeping bag.

I never really thought of a sleeping bag as anything all that great in the past. The one I had was a cheap one, but it worked.

Then this year I went camping and it was cold and very windy. Even in our popup camper, you could feel the wind. The first night I had a big pile of blankets and I was freezing. Then the next night my dad suggested I try a sleeping bag. I’ll admit I was skeptical since a pile of blankets hadn’t done the trick in keeping me warm, but I decided to give it a try anyway.

I was really warm that night, almost to the point of being too warm in that thing. Now, I definitely appreciate the good ol’ sleeping bag.

So what should you look for when picking a sleeping bag?

When picking a quality sleeping bag, you basically have two options – synthetic or down (and a few offer the best of both worlds).

Down is generally going to be the warmer option, but synthetic insulation is cheaper and new synthetic sleeping bags are getting closer to the insulating power of goose down sleeping bags.

I remember the first time I went camping. A bit of a late comer to the camping scene, I didn’t go on my first real camping trip until I was in college.

Our trip involved a 5 hour drive and by the time we got to the campsite it was getting dark and we still had to setup our tent.

I didn’t own a tent at the time and I had never set one up before but my friend had borrowed one from his parents. This thing was old and neither of us were experts in the setup of this thing. It took us about 45 minutes before we finally figured out how to put all the pieces together. I maintain that we would have had got that sucker setup a lot faster had we not been holding flashlights trying to find all the pieces, but nonetheless it took a while.

These days I have my own tent and it can be setup completely in less than 10 minutes (including inflating my air mattress to sleep on).

However, today I’m feeling like 10 minutes to setup a tent is an eternity. I just found a tent that can be setup in 2 seconds! Seriously, you take this thing, throw it in the air, and by the time it hits the the tent has deployed and is setup. All you need to do is anchor it to the ground. It’s called the “2 Seconds” tent and it’s made by Quechua.

They have several different models and colors to choose from. So if you’re looking for a freaking sweet tent and you want something that can get setup in a hurry (think of how nice that’d be if you have to setup in the rain) then this tent rocks.

Want one? They start at $83 and are available from Quechua.com

You can watch this tent in action in this video (I was mesmerized). The first one shows the throw and deploy technique. The second one is a home video that shows setup and how quickly it can be taken down (about 20 seconds)

Here’s a cool video I found on Youtube that gives you the lowdown on tents. It talks about price ranges and the different styles for tents. It’s just under 8 minutes long but has a bunch of cool info.

Yeah, the dude in the video has a British accent, but I’m willing to let that slide.