The Perfect Tent

Matthew and I went shopping today for a new tent. Our current tent is a "two man hiking tent". You can fit two people who really like each other in it, but it's main design is to be small for hiking - it comes up to my waist in height. We are likely going to be camping when one of my friends is in Victoria, and it occured to us that she wouldn't fit in our tent... So, we finally bought a real tent like we'd planned on doing for ages.

Buying a tent is a really, really hard decision. You want a big one, so you have lots of space and in case you have a few people with you. But if it's too big it will be hard to find a good spot to camp at the beach. You want one that's waterproof, but you need to be able to get a good breeze through it for queensland hot weather camping. Tall tents blow over in the wind.... you need one that can withstand the gales that blow up the beach front and flatten tents that aren't already only waist high. You want one that you can stand up in, but if it's too tall having trees around could be prohibitive to putting a tent up (and you need trees for your hammock). It needs to be relatively quick to put up and pack up otherwise you're cutting into valuable camping time. Plus, it's good if it's a pretty colour. Then there are little accessories you never know you might want. Some tents have little zip up bits where all the guy ropes come off so they can just be zipped up into those when you're packing up, and they don't all get tangled with each other. Those tents might even have bits so nearly every window or door that's not being used, can be zipped away. Some tents have littlel pockets around the place and lots of hooks so you can hang shelves and things. Plus, it should be affordable.

You can imagine how long it took us looking at tents to decide what we wanted. When we finally decided (on a tent out of our price range), there were none in stock. So we went to one of the other stores of the same name.... Luckily they had it for $60 less then the store that was out of stock, which almost put it back in the right price range! Our tent is actually a christmas present from both sets of parents, and we are very grateful. It is blue and silver, it has two rooms, one's a sleeping room, the other one is a "kitchen" and it has lots of doors/windows. Both are fully floored and waterproof and so if we wanted to we could sleep 8 people (squishied) in it, but it is technically a 4 man tent. It is a "Geo-family 4".

We had a very late lunch - bought a sour dough breadroll and put smoked roast beef, lettuce, tomato, camembert and apricot/capsicum chutney on it. It tasted so good that we scrapped the idea we had for our left over roast lamb, bought some more sourdough bread and had the same thing for dinner except with thin slices of roast lamb instead of smoked roast beef. The simple things in life...