Thursday 3 June 2010

Camping Arrangements!

Hi Guys

For my forthcoming skate I plan to try a bit of free camping, which is basically setting up camp wherever feels appropriate e.g. under a bridge, in a field, between the trees etc etc. This is to save a few pennies on accomodation costs and also because I love camping.

With this in mind i set out to acquire a suitable, lightweight tent or bivvy bag. I also had a look at hammocks but ruled them out for several reasons including kit security and weatherproofing, but although I dismissed the idea I did find some extraordinary cool hammocks which almost took my fancy.

With hammocks out of the idea I set my sights on to bivvybags, which although lightweight and adequate for what I wanted the lack of a room feeling to them and being able to keep my bag and board dry on wet nights/days forced them out of my mind and in with the hammocks. But while looking I discovered some great bivvybags with rollhoops over your head so you can zip up to keep the bugs out and relieve some otherwise claustrophobic nights in non rollhopp bivvy bags.
This left me looking for tents and due to weight and space limitations i quickly realised I would need to go down the hiking tents. these are minimal weight 1 or 2 man tents with either a singular or double pole construction and a typical wedge design (although some of the more expensive tents are structurally different to better battle the elements). I quickly decided to keep my options cheap and cheerful and was struggling to find the need to spend anymore than £50.

After maybe 2 hours of twoing and frowing across the internet i narrowed my options down to 3 tents all of which were 2man tents (I am 6'3" and fancied some added luxury of headroom).
- coleman bedrock
- coleman rigel
- gelert mongoose

All 3 were similar in weight with the coleman rigel being the lightest by a whole kg which almost swayed it for me if it were not for the +£50 price tag (I hovered my finger over the buy button for quite some while though. The tent is very nicely designed and came recommended) but my want to keep it cheap forced me to keep looking. It came down to the coleman bedrock and the gelert mongoose and with both good and bad reviews on each I came to a decision on the bedrock 2 man tent by coleman which although was not the lightest or the most highly praised out of the 3 it did have the cheapest price tag and got it ordered and delivered for £36...BARGAIN.

Once it arrived the very next day I quickly realised the pack length was a bit longer than anticipated but was nowhere near as heavy as I was expecting. I am still yet to find a suitable time to set it up due to a lack of garden but photos will be on the way when I am not so busy.

links
-coleman bedrock was ordered from www.simplyhike.co.uk
-tent reviews came from a fantastic site www.livefortheoutdoors.com and I would highly reccomend checking it out before buying any camping gear.

Regards
Sam

4 comments:

Stacey Bartlett said...

well least you dont always have to rely on finding some where to sleep for the night now. but there is the whole problem of where is it legal to just camp? or you just going to camp wherever anyway?
but least the tent doesnt look too bad!
xx

Sam said...

yeah the legality is questionable but farmers wont mind me camping in their field, as long as i'm long gone by the time they come around :)

Stacey Bartlett said...

so basically as long as they dont find out, they wont mind!! haha fair play x

Anonymous said...

what momma doesn't know doesn't hurt her.
And i think you will have the same rights as a gypsy which means your allowed to camp on public land for 3 days before you can be asked to move on

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