Monday, September 17, 2007

Of tents and men

This weekend just gone was a busy one. Not that I did anything terribly exciting - I didn't really have time.

Saturday morning was spent doing essential domestic things like cleaning the bathroom and kitchen before something nasty could move in. The rest of the weekend was spent becoming familiar with the intricacies of phpBB, glowering at lace or wrestling with tents.

Lace and phpBB will undoubtedly get revisited, but for now the topic of choice is that of tents.

A couple of weeks ago, I bought a new tent to replace my good old faithful blue and red tent that I use when camping without Dave. I chose the Vango V500 and picked one up from Go Outdoors. Sadly, the first one I picked up was missing a toggle on one of the window covers so I took it back for an exchange which they willing did because I not only swapped it for a replacement I also bought a second one for Richard.

Not wanting to leave it until arriving on site to discover something more vital than a toggle was missing, I decided a test pitch was necessary. And being helpful, I volunteered to test pitch the one I picked up for Richard at the same time.

Cue a good two hours of fun on Saturday afternoon and another hour or so on Sunday morning as Dave and I unpacked, pitched, collapsed and repacked two tents. Our efforts were of course carefully monitored and at times aided by our feline companions, with Charlie being particularly keen to oversee the operation.

As you can see the tent is a good size and practically fills our lawn.


Sunday's efforts were much more efficient than Saturday's with the tent going up in under half an hour. It was fairly easy, but definitely a two man job as you need quite a bit of tension on the poles to get them hooked onto the pointy thing (a technical term for the pin on the straps) but no where near so bad as my big green tent.

Dave was quick to volunteer to check the inside of the tents for size which as you can see is quite roomy. Dave's final verdict being that he could happily see himself camping in one of them.

1 comment:

RichT said...

Dave’s expression of err happiness…. from the tent was well worth the photo, and it’s good that you have had practice putting up my tent you will be able to demonstrate it to me in a couple of weeks :)

So that a big thank you from me, for the tent check up and the photo of Dave.

Ps the photo of Charlie and Missy are good too