Essential Tips for Choosing Family Tent to Make Your Camping a Great Fun
There is nothing more fun than going on a camping trip with your entire family. But the real fun is when everyone is in the same room at the nighttime. This will need a family tent and you’ll have to buy it. But with so many available out there, which one should you buy? Here we’ll consider some essential factors to decide this one-by-one.
Types of Tent
A great variety has arisen in the types of tents and you may come across some new terms, including:
Air-tents
These use inflatable “beams” in place of poles. They are quick to set up, lightweight and still sturdy. However, you can’t afford to forget carrying the air pump, otherwise you are ruined.
Pop-up Tents
As the name suggests, they are just to pop up. They are typically smaller and perhaps best suited to short trips or a night in the garden.
Tunnel Tents
As their name implies, they have a design of a tunnel, with a series of poles (in fact air-beams) forming arches and offering ample headroom. Nowadays most ‘family’ tents have this design.
Trailer Tents
They are perhaps old-school, but hold their own in the form of space provided. You will have to fit a tow bar to your car. However, you may face the problem of storing them when not in use.
Size of the Tent
Will you be camping with a big family group or a small intimate one, with just you, your spouse and children? Depending on this, you’ll need either a big family tent or a small one. Visit FamilyTent.Expert to get thorough knowledge about family camping and how to make it fun!
Over the years, there are a lot of improvements in tent materials and designs, but even in size. Even there are some huge ‘tent palaces’ available, that are so huge that even caravans look smaller than them.
Although big family tents are spacious enough to accommodate your entire family and the necessary gear in a comfortable way, they have their own shortcomings, including:
- You’ll have to remember that these tents are heavy and bulky, and so, difficult to carry. Your car needs to have enough space for them and they can be even too heavy for a trailer.
- Being big-sized, they can also take longer to erect and take down and will need at least two people. If you two have come with your children, supervising kids may be a problem while you both are engaged in putting up the tent.
- It’s a tendency to carry many things if your tent is big. This creates a problem because the more stuff you have, the longer you’d take to set up the camp.
- Some campsites may not allow you to erect a really huge tent or will need you to hire two sites.
- Such a big tent is worth buying only if you are planning a holiday with a big group and staying for multiple nights. But if you’ll be staying only for one night, with only spouse and children, you can buy a much smaller tent.
- Some camping enthusiasts buy both the types of tents to have the two experiences. They leave the big tent for a couple of weeks camping in the summer while staying in the smaller one for only one night on weekends.
Bedrooms and Layout
Another factor to consider is the number of bedrooms you’ll need. Actually you should consider this even before considering how many people the tent can accommodate.
Also, the more bedrooms a tent has, the bigger storage space it has, which is important when it comes to family camping.
Tent Layouts for Young Kids
If your child is very young (up to early school age), think about buying a tent in which your bedroom will be next to the child’s and both the rooms will have a divider which can be unzipped.
A separate bedroom for a young child allows you to put them to sleep earlier without any disturbance from others. And the unzipping divider also keeps you close to them enough so as to quickly comfort them if they wake, usually even without having to leave your sleeping bag.
Tent Layouts for Growing Families
For a family of four, the two-bedroom four-person is fine. However, as kids grow bigger or if more kids arrive in the family, more number of bedrooms will be needed.
However, in case of three-bedroom tents, make sure you check them well because their third bedroom may be smaller or sometimes even not even a proper bedroom and sometimes may even cover the main entryway.
When Kids are Older
By the time of hitting the secondary school age, children want much more independence. If your family contains teenage boys as well as girls, your tent should have separate bedrooms for them to offer them independence from parents as well as from each other.
More Inclusions
Berth
Berths will increase the size of the tent at least two persons from what it says. Thus a four-berth tent will offer great coziness to two adults and two children, in addition to having all the camping stuff inside the tent. However, choosing more berths will only make it difficult for you to fold it neatly and fit in the car.
Height
Unless you are fond of crawling around in your tent, choose one with ample headroom. Plus it’s great to have a spare sleeping pod for ‘stuff’.
Groundsheet
You can get it either an integral (sewn-in) or separate. Integral groundsheet will keep bugs out, but some campers prefer to unclip and dry it separately.
Knowing these points, you can now take a more informed decision and choose just the right family tent to have great fun!
