You might remember a ridiculous song about Alice the Camel having five humps that you sang as a child? (If not here’s a demonstration we’ve found you on YouTube!!!)… well our Alice also has five humps!! Or at least sometimes – other times she only has 3 or 4!
In this picture she has all her humps – the main tent which comes with a sort of veranda, an additional canopy extension and a vestibule. The additional bits all just zip on so you can add them or not depending on the space you need for that particular trip. Just as in the song, Alice might only have 4 humps sometimes!!
In theory you could probably just keep adding more & more canopy extensions – but we tend to think that 5 humps is big enough… especially when there’s only usually 2 people sleeping inside!!
We’ve recently been telling you about Alice the Palace our Kampa Hayling tent. Well in keeping with her royal title, Alice likes to travel in style!!
Being pretty big and being made of polycotton rather than just polyester, she is pretty heavy. The stronger goat can just about manouvre her, but only with the aid of the Alice’s travel carriage – a bag designed for the Vango Airbeam tent!
Although not designed for the Kampa tent, this bag is ideal – it is big enough to be able to roll Alice into it without too much trouble. There are seatbelts (well straps!) to compress her down a bit, but best of all there are wheels. She can be wheeled from the car, straight down the driveway and into the garage.
It’s definitely worth doing some research and not just going with the packing solutions offered by your particular tent manafacturer.
In the post about our recent camping trip, we promised to introduce you to Alice properly. Well here she is in all her beauty at Pit Hill campsite:
Some of you might actually remember her arrival. She is a Kampa Hayling 4 Classic in polycotton. For a large tent, she is pretty easy to put up as she is inflatable and we have an electric pump and battery pack, so we don’t even need to pump manually!
What’s with her name? Well, of all our tents she is by far the most luxurious. We found ourselves describing her as a palace – so when we were trying to think of a name for her we decided Alice the Palace had a nice ring to it!
We’ll look forward to introducing her more fully over the next few blog posts.
On our chillier camping trips, as we wrap ourselves in our many layers, hug our hot water bottles and snuggle into our warm sleeping bags, we often think about people who are sleeping in tents every night, not by choice, but because there is no other option. We generally conclude that much as we love camping with all our accessories, we’d make pretty rubbish refugees!
In light of those conversations, this charity appeal caught our eye: Give a tent for Lent .
Particularly in the lead up to Easter, we are aware that we have been blessed with so much – so it seemed a fitting thing to do to help provide a tempory home for a family who find themselves needing to live in a tent!
Camping season has begun!!We are currently enjoying coffee & cake by a fire to take off the chill in the air.
The we managed to get the tent up before the rain, and it stopped to enable us to go for a walk & cook dinner on the fire last night. However everything is muddy! Good job we packed our wellies!!
It wasn’t too cold overnight…especially if you have double thermals on, carpets & down sleeping bags.
When we arrived at Stockbridge View recently, not only was the weather cold, it was very windy. We thought it might be helpful to share our tips for pitching in the wind:
choose your location well. We are actually notoriously bad at this, we always want to pitch for the best view – usually the windiest spot on the top of the hill. We are slowly learning that sometimes it is wiser to forego the view and pitch in the shelter of a hedge or wall.
consider your angle. You probably want to try to pitch streamlined, especially if your tent is long and thin. Put the lower bits of the tent into the wind to guide the air over the tent rather than to buffet it. You don’t want to put your door into the wind – if you do the wind will come in when you open the door and lift your tent up like a kite. Pitching with your back to the wind also means that you can sit in your tent doorway and enjoy the shelter of your tent.
where will the fire go? Fires are an essential part of the camping experience, but in the wind you have to be a bit careful. Firstly you need to think about which way the wind will blow the flames. A gust can make the flames lick out quite far. You need to be a safe distance from your tent which is highly flammable! Of course the wind can also make lighting the fire difficult, so locating the firepit down wind of the tent, might make it easier to light as well as making sure the flames blow away from the tent. Bizarrely as well as being hard to light fires in the wind, it is also hard to get them properly out. A strong wind during the night can relight embers that looked like they were dying. In windy conditions knocking a fire out isn’t enough, always add water too.
make full use of guys. Sometimes it’s tempting not to use all the peg holes and guy ropes, but in the wind you really need to. Your tent was probably designed to withstand a bit of wind, but they were assuming you put it up as per the instructions! Guy ropes should be pegged out and then tightened. On normal tents, tighten as much as you can. On inflatable tents, it’s possible to overtighten and bend the poles out of shape – moderately tight should be fine.
pick good pegs. Our favourites for the wind are delta pegs . We put a few on the key guy ropes of each tent. If you are using normal metal pegs, angle them into the ground – if they form a continuation of the line of your guy rope, they are the wrong way round, they need to be pointing in towards your tent and roughly forming a 90 degree angle with your guy rope. Especially if the ground is soft try to get the pegs all the way in. If you can get the hook bit down onto the ground it will help stop it spinning round and the guy rope breaking free. There are also various v-shaped pegs available which stop the pegs from doing this. A mallet is an essential tool for getting a tent up firmly. A peg-puller might also be needed to get it down again!
weight your tent down. You can also help your tents stability by thinking where you put your heavier items inside the tent. If the wind is tending to get under a particular corner, maybe that’s the location for your suitcase or coolbox or whatever other weighty items you have.
know your limits. If your camp arrangement becomes unsafe, be sensible about when you need to put the fire out or retreat to your car.
Hope you have a safe camp trip & don’t get blown away.
In our last post we confessed that we hadn’t camped as much as we’d like to last summer, but that our tent had been up to other things. Turns out bell tents aren’t only useful for camping in…
One of the goats had the honour of being her sister’s bridesmaid this summer and with that came responsibilities for a hen party. With the help of a party decorator Sandy the Bell Tent and Gary the Gazebo were transformed into a stylish venue for a garden hen party!
In the last post we talked about the end of season sort out. But once everything is cleaned, dried, repaired and stocks replenished then what?
Having dedicated place to store camping equipment is helpful. It keeps everything in one place, making it easier to pack and unpack – and as a result hopefully you are less likely to forget something (having a list also helps with this!).
Be mindful of what you are storing. It is better to store things like sleeping bags inside the house. And generally you are advised to store them loose, not tightly screwed up in their compression sacks to help preserve their loft (that is their fluffy-ness) and warmth.
It is also ideal to store tents indoors, particularly if they are canvas. However, not many people have space for this and ours live in the garage.
We’ve found the best way to store things is in plastic storage containers. We particularly like the ‘Really Useful’ boxes as they have proved to be sturdy and durable. They are also made in the UK and can be recycled in the rigid plastic section of your local tip… although I’m not sure we’ve actually broken any to need to recycle them!
It’s helpful to store items in your in categories. For example, we have a. kitchen box, a peg box and a lighting box. This makes it easy to find things… especially if the next time you are looking in these boxes is in the dark in the middle of a camping field!!
Be careful where you store food supplies. Animals are good at getting into lofts and garages. Only keep tinned items in these places and then in a plastic box to make sure they don’t get damp. One winter a squirrel tried to gnaw its way through a plastic box in the loft to get at our supplies! Since then the sleeping bags are also in a roomy plastic crate in the loft – imagine getting your sleeping bag out for your first trip in Spring and finding that baby squirrels had also decided it was a warm place to sleep!!
If you are storing in the garage, it’s probably worth investing in some shelving. These metal mesh shelves in my garage keep everything organised and easily accessible and also keep the tents off the ground and with the air circulating to avoid them getting damp.
Hopefully the kit won’t be in its Winter hibernation for long… counting down until the camping season begins again!
Embrace your inner goat 