Air mattresses

I sleep on a rock currently because it is an odd sized mattress. I have friends who have been sleeping in a full size air mattress from Wal mart for over two years. It has a 3" memory foam topper plus a queen size heated mattress pad on top of the foam. They like their bed. Says it's the closest to what their waterbed felt like. They also said that they had to keep adding air to the mattress until it stopped stretching. It took about a month to get the air bed fully stretched. Their kids slept on similar air mattresses for 10 years. I think they replaced the air mattress once for each kid. They did have to patch a few times due to the cat. As for "lasting forever", a regular mattress should be replaced every 5 to 7 years. These people used to take a baffled waterbed mattress tent camping. They would fill it with air using a foot pump. Then lay a sleeping bag on top between them and the mattress. The top of the mattress would be about a foot off the ground. The first time I saw it I laughed. But on a camping trip with them a few months later, we were subjected to a downpour and my tent was literally floating along with my foam pad and sleeping bag (I finished the night out sleeping in the back of my station wagon). My friends (and their dog) slept high and dry even though the floor of their tent flooded too. I stopped laughing at them over their waterbed mattress. I also started looking more closely at the "crazy" things they did. I have discovered they may have some "crazy" ideas but most of what they do works, works for a low cost and works very well. So much so that I have been incorporating many of their ways into my own. So some may want to take a second look at air mattress. Not those skinny things but the ones that are about the same thickness of a "real' mattress. I know my friend have theirs sitting on a plywood deck with an old comforter between the plywood and mattress to prevent the wood from abrading the mattress.