Of tents and tea and tantrums, and toy kitchens and swings

[ailbhe]

Our new swingset is awesome. The toy kitchen is out in the toy house, and that's awesome too - it was originally intended for the toy house but was too awesome for the garden initially. The garden as a whole is great at the moment, there's enough grass to play on and enough stuff to sit on and I'm tidying it up a bit and the beds have things in them and some of the flowers look amazing and the food plants are growing. Emer ate the first perfectly ripe blackberry of the season this evening.

We spent the weekend at the All Ages Gathering, a Quaker thing, quite close by. We were in our 4-man Eurohike tent which we got when I was pregnant with Emer. It's a sort of tunnel shape - I think the design is called Vis A Vis? - with a two-person sleeping pod at each end and a living area in the middle; either wall can be the door / porch roof. It weighs just over 9kg and we've used it pretty thoroughly.

It won't do any more. We can't quite cope comfortably with the sleeping room available, not without somewhere else to put luggage.

We've looked at all sorts of things. The Vaude Badawi looks nice, especially the model with three bedrooms, but it's so far out of our price range it can't see our price range even with top-of-the-line ultra-lightweight water-and-sandproof binoculars in awesome hipster colours. I'm currently looking pretty intently at the Skandika one which ticks several of our boxes - it has three sleeping rooms, Rob can stand up in the middle of it, apparently it only weighs 12.3kg, and the groundsheet for the main living area is not stitched in. It's flysheet-first, which makes it easier to keep everything dry, and at a push I could erect it myself if I had to. We'd prefer an additional 5cm headroom, but I think it'll be fine. Not having a window will be a bit weird though.

Tea and tantrums will have to wait for another post. Ah well.

Comments

[euphrosyna]

I have never even been in a tent but you have me surfing Amazon looking at them. How did you do that?!

[ailbhe]

Tents are brilliant.

[happydisciple.livejournal.com]

I have no idea what your pricerange is, but Cotswold Outdoor seem to be having a little bit of a sale on. Blacks look like they have a decent range. Ellis Brigham's range of larger tents is rather small.

[helenprev.livejournal.com]

Ahahahahah the lure of tent porn! I spend HOURS at it sometimes.... ;-)

[helenprev.livejournal.com]

That tent looks pretty awesome and for the size, the weight is amazingly light! I have gone for flysheet first this time and am looking forward to easier (and much drier) pitching this year!

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

Blackberries? But it's only June! Are the apples ready to match? Up here both are still small and green,

[ailbhe]

Under £200 and under 15kg, with three sleeping pods. It's a small niche market really.

[ailbhe]

Only one ripe berry, but some of the green ones are getting big. No apples on my tree, only aphids...

[ailbhe]

We have to be able to carry our tents! I'm really hoping to get it so that the children can carry their own sleeping bags and mats, because those are light and bulky. We try never to have more than a mile to walk at the end of a bus or train journey.

[tiggsybabes.livejournal.com]

I'd love a proper garden, how fab. Though our new allotment can double up as a garden 5 minutes walk from our house, I'm sure.

[ai731.livejournal.com]

Yeah. We go camping at festivals once or twice a summer - we need space for two adults people for 5 days of stuff, *plus* musical instruments (guitars, and sometimes drums), so that puts us firmly in the "family tent" category. I searched everywhere for something suitable, and I thought I'd scored well with the one I bought two years back, only to discover, on erecting it for the first time, that the FLYSHEET ONLY COVERS THE FRONT HALF OF THE TENT! This detail had been hidden in the two photo angles of the tent provided on the website / packaging. So every year I have to set it up in the garden and spray an entire can of waterproofing on the un-flysheeted end of the tent. *sigh* Maybe one day we'll have money to buy a high-tech expedition tent. One that's actually intended to keep people & gear dry in adverse conditions, you know?

[juliet]

If you wanted to go up in weight a smidge, we got a folding sack truck thingy for taking our 12kg 4-6 person tent to festivals. Although as we found out this year in fact one person can carry it a mile or so along with their rucksack, as long as that person is uon rather than, say, me.

[ailbhe]

Heh, yeah, but one thing that might happen is me taking all three children camping and Rob joining us for the weekends, so I really do have to be able to carry it.

I am trying to figure out a way of having a wheelbarrow though. I think a fabric-based wheelbarrow-thing would be pretty good.

[juliet]

I think I personally would find the sack truck (ours looks like this but we didn't pay anything like that much for it; there are other cheaper similar things) easier to manage than a wheelbarrow, but mileage varies etc etc. I can pull ours one-handed, though, whereas wheelbarrows IME tend to be a two-handed experience.

I guess you might get more stuff into a wheelbarrow, though; the sack truck will hold the tent (bungee cords required) & maybe one smallish bag on top & that's it.