Which tent?
Man, you’d think we’d have figured it out by now!
We were chatting to the sales rep at Freedom Camping, who of course was one-eyed biased towards their tents, and gave us lots of horror stories of people who had headed off around Australia with a cabin tent (like we have just bought), only to have it collapse half way up the East coast, and then they got a Freedom Touring tent and lived happily ever after! But the Freedom touring tents cost anywhere between $1,800 and $2,600!
Now, we realised after, that the cabin tents he was referring to were much flimsier than ours is (he found it hard to believe that there were 40kg of poles, and simply ignored us when we said that it had YKK zips), but he certainly had a point when it comes to the time and effort required to set them up and take them down again.
The second time that we put up our tent it took 1.5 hours (compared to 3 hours the first time). And taking it down took us 1 hour. But a touring tent can go up in 10 minutes (by one person) and down again in about the same.
However space is an issue. He was saying that you simply don’t spend any time in the tent - it is just for sleeping - but in our case we WILL be living in it. We will be doing work (school work, paid computer-based work), relaxing, cooking, and sheltering from storms. We won’t be going out every day - we simply don’t have the energy.
But the setup and packup IS an issue. It only just dawned on me (don’t ask me why I hadn’t kind of “clicked” on this one before) that we will need to pack everything up, drive, then set everything up ON THE SAME DAY!!! So now we are thinking, if we get a touring tent big enough to fit all our beds (but nothing more) - then we can pack up the cabin tent the day before we leave, sleep in the touring tent, pack all that up nice and quickly in the morning. Then drive to the next place, and set up the touring tent again. Then the next day we can set up the cabin tent. Or decide we will only be there a few days, and stay in the touring tent!
So now I’m looking at the alternatives. From reading discussions, it seems the OzTrail is ok, and I have found a place where I can pick one up for $400 (RRP $560) with only $10 P+P. Now just to pray about it, to make sure it’s not just a ‘us’ idea, but God supports it too.
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