How many is too many?

Sunday, 28 February 2021

The topic of tent ownership came up during our campsite discussions on the weekend. In particular the question of how many is too many?  

As it happened, the weekend was also the first outing for our 2 newish pop-up tents that we bought perhaps a little too hastily when we got back from Europe. We'd had such a good time car camping in our European versions that we wanted to duplicate the experience at home.  When we ordered them we must have forgotten that when we are in Australia we aren't really driving from campsite to campsite for weeks on end.  Despite being spacious and quick to put up and take down, they take up a bit of room (although they pack flat under everything else in the car which is handy) and you'd never want to carry them too far away from the car.  We donated our European ones to the campsite at Bohinj, where they now live a life of being rented out to campers.

Jett in Slovenia 

 Big Agnes (left) & new pop-ups on right 

 As the kids decided that a pop-up tent each was appropriate, we also took our new hiking tent that we got for the South Coast Track.  It's called a 'Big Agnes' and it weighs 1.8kg compared to the Macpac Minaret weight of 2.4kg while being twice as spacious and having two doors so you don't have to step on the head of your tent-mate each time you leave it.  I love it. It is also the most expensive in our tent fleet.

Adding to the tent tally is my battered and leaky old Minaret that went on my first trip to Europe in 1990, and my new Minaret from 2015. Rob took the new one on the South Cape Track and it was perfectly good for him - essentially it's a heavy one-person tent that can survive a storm.

We also needed to buy Jett a solo person's tent for the South Coast Track as he wisely decided not to share with Uncle Paul. It's pretty light (1.4kg) and quite tight! Jett's is the front one, and my New Minaret is in the background below:

Then we have the family tent we bought when the kids were too small to be by themselves.  We never went with a huge multi room tent, but we do have the large one-room + awning model that we haven't used for ages - I think the last time was Jon's last Overland Track run in 2017. It's a pain to put up and take down but you can stand up in it, and you can just fit four sleeping mats side by side with no floorspace in between. The awning is very nice in bad weather and it would still be good for a multi-day car camping trip.

And that just leaves the 2 Denali cheapo hiking tents that were used on the kids ill-fated non-adult camping trip:

Heavier than the Minaret (2.8kgs), these were much cheaper ($200 rather than $500) and more spacious and for those reasons, once we saw we had a good weather forecast, we took them on the Overland track in 2016 (Bjørn borrowed my Minaret on that occasion).   Through lots of use over the years both of ours are getting pretty battered and the floors are riddled in small holes from a corby worm attack when they were used in our garden overnight one birthday party. 

So. That makes 9 tents.  To be fair, three of them (the 2 Denali tents & my old Minaret) are probably not very useful anymore except for maybe at a music festival when it doesn't matter when someone falls on them and busts a pole! I'm keeping them for parts though.

So that leaves 6 functioning tents.  3 for hiking and 3 for car camping.  Is that ok?  Maybe?  If I was forced to reduce our stock to just two, I'd sell them all except our new Big Agnes and use the money to buy another Big Agnes for the kids to share as it's the perfect combo of being spacious enough for car camping, and light enough for hiking.