The other day I was caught in a downpour. When I say downpour I mean D-O-W-N-P-O-U-R! I spent about 10 seconds (or less) running from my car into Dillard's. I was absolutely and positively soaked! I could wring out my hair, it was so bad. I realized then that I needed to keep some sort of raincoat in the car, again. Actually, I have an SUV and I keep a duffel bag in the car with all kinds of emergency schtuff. I used to live in Alaska and that was pretty much required. Old habits, die hard, I guess. Anyway, to my dismay there was nothing in that bag for rain. What was I thinking?! After searching around here at Amazon, I decided that this was the one I wanted. What a great buy! It is much better than I thought it would be. Below are my pros and cons: + Has a flap around the snaps, to prevent water from getting through the openings between snaps. + Is longer than I expected. It goes down to my mid-calf and I'm tall. + Has a soft inner lining. Actually, that should be softer. It's not baby soft but beats rubber against your skin. + Has arm pit air holes. + It comes in a fairly good quality zippered bag, so can be folded and put back into the bag for my car's duffel. + Price, price, price!!! - Hood is detachable. This was a problem also in Alaska. It's been my experience that all hoods that detach get lost. We're talking several hundred dollar parkas that have missing hoods. THAT gets very upsetting and this may be no different (except price of course). A rain coat is only worn in the rain, so a hood is a necessity. There should be no reason to remove it. For an in-the-middle observation, it's neither thick nor thin. It's not as thick as I would have liked it to be (if I could wave my magic wand), but it is thicker than I expected to be, especially after reading all the angry thickness reviews. I saw that they said it was designed to fit over your clothes, but I still went one size up. I now live in Mobile, Alabama (yeah, the exact opposite of Alaskan weather) where it rains all the time, even in winter. For this reason, I wanted it to fit over my somewhat-winter coat too. This coat was actually bigger than I expected. If I had to do it again, I'm not sure I'd go one size up. Just thought that may be helpful to some. Maybe not. The quality is average, but I'd say better than Walmart clothes. Most of my Walmart clothes begin falling apart after their first wash, if that long. I don't expect this to have any problems, unless mistreated. All in all, I'm very pleased and I highly recommend it.
