Between 2011 July and 2011 September, my partner and I did a 3 300km bicycle tour of southern France. The below is a review of a product that we used during that tour.
This PlastaZote ethylene vinyl acetate (EVA) sleeping pad is 180cm by 50cm (I cut it down from 60cm) by 3mm and weighs 47,6g.
One would be fooling oneself to say that this pad adds a lot of comfort or a lot of protection from the chill of terra firma. It provides sufficient padding to get a night of fairly good sleep. If the earth is forgiving, this pad can be very comfortable. If the earth is not forgiving, you're going to wake up a few times through the night to change positions, especially, I suspect, if you're boney like me. This was not due entirely to the pad-- I was also more prone to tossing and turning due to a shoulder injury. When the ground was hard and it wasn't too cold, I could double the pad onto itself, which helped with the hip bone and shoulders significantly.
Because this pad is so light and thin, it will turn into very interesting shapes if you don't anchor it. I struggled with this until I started anchoring it under my "pillow" (my sleeping bag sack stuffed with all of the clothing I wasn't using; on cold nights this could be a bit uncomfortable since I often wore all of my clothing). Once I figured that out it stayed in place. Another consequence of the pad's weight and thickness is that it garnered a few holes over the trip. These holes were nothing I worried about. EVA is resilient and tear-resistant, so the holes were isolated and few. I think a deer may have even bitten off a bit of the pad while I wasn't looking, too. Deer are odd like that.
What this pad does provide is light weight, portability and lashability. I originally cut this down to 50cm so that it would fit onto my top-tube. This was workable, but only just. I then placed it beneath my saddle, lashed with two velcro straps, including a heavy duty reflective one (12,5g; I decided to bring it only at the last second despite the weight) and a much smaller 2,5g one. This allowed it to double as a fender on rainy days (see photo above). Though EVA is not waterproof, it is water resistant and it dries very quickly. Despite several days of rain, only twice in the 76 days of travel was it too wet to use.
One drawback of EVA is that it is a fairly tenacious odor keeper. The bicycle storage at the Toulouse HI Hostel smells about as bad as something can smell without including dead bodies. This is compounded by humidity, which is so prominent that the air feels wet as you walk through it. I'm from California. I'm not used to this utterly disgusting feeling. I don't know how people survive the summers in humid regions. Truly horrible. Anyway, we came into Toulouse from a hard, rainy day. I forgot to grab the pad before we left the storage area. When we retrieved the bikes two days later, the pad smelled indescribably bad. The smell is no longer immediately apparent on the pad, but I don't make a point of going around taking deep whiffs of the thing either.
EVA sleeping pad: 47,6g
velcro strap (reflective): 12,5g
velcro strap: 2,5g
total: 62,6g
