We loved the ENO Parklite Hammock Chair Stand almost immediately, mostly because it takes one of the best things about a hammock and removes the most annoying part: having to find exactly the right place to hang it.

A hammock sounds wonderfully simple until you’re actually trying to use one. You need two trees. They need to be the right distance apart. They need to be strong enough. They need to be somewhere you actually want to sit. And sometimes the prettiest spot—the place overlooking the water, beside the camper, at the edge of a field, or right where everybody else is gathered—doesn’t have a single useful tree nearby.

This fixes that.

The Parklite gives you that relaxed, suspended hammock feeling in something that can actually go with you. That was the thing we liked most about it. It isn’t something that has to live permanently on a porch or wait for the perfect campsite. It packs down into its carrying case, weighs less than nine pounds with the bag, and doesn’t require tools to set up, so it’s genuinely portable enough to toss in the vehicle and bring along.

And once you start doing that, you realize how many places you want it.

Take it camping and put it beside the fire. Carry it down by the water. Set it up outside the camper. Bring it to an outdoor concert, a long afternoon at a festival, a family gathering, or anywhere else you know you’re going to be sitting around for a while. Put it in the backyard when you want to read outside. Move it onto the porch. Take it somewhere just because the view is good.

That portability is what made it feel different from a regular hammock stand. A big backyard hammock stand is furniture. This feels more like gear.

It’s also simply more comfortable than the standard folding camp chair most of us have hauled around for years. Instead of sitting stiffly upright with a metal bar somewhere you don’t want a metal bar, you settle into it. You can lean back, tuck your feet up, read, watch the water, talk around a fire, or sit there doing absolutely nothing—which, frankly, is one of the best uses for it.

There is also something particularly nice about having your own comfortable little spot when you’re outdoors. Everybody else might be sitting in folding chairs or on picnic benches, and you’re basically hanging in your own personal hammock nest.

The stand has a 300-pound capacity and works with most gathered-end hammocks up to 10 feet long, which also makes it more useful than something designed around one proprietary chair. If you already love hammock camping or already own an ENO-style hammock, it feels like a natural extension of something you already use.

What surprised us most was how quickly it became one of those things you start bringing along “just in case.” You might not know exactly where you’re going to use it when you leave the house. You just know there is a pretty good chance that, at some point during the day, you are going to be very glad it is in the car.

And that is probably the best way to describe why we liked it so much: it gives you a really good seat almost anywhere.

Not just a place to sit. A place you actually want to sit.

For us, that makes the ENO Parklite Hammock Chair Stand a nearly perfect go-with-you chair—portable enough to travel, comfortable enough to choose over an ordinary camp chair, and versatile enough that you keep finding new places to use it.