Camping is as we all know a very cost effective way of managing family holidays, fair enough you are at the mercy of the weather to some extent, but generally speaking it is a great method of getting away on a budget. As a child almost all of our holidays were taken in a large frame tent, around Europe and the UK and I still have fond memories of these, even though we were jammed into a VW Beetle for most of them.
We certainly have not spent as much time under canvas with our children, partially due to the availability of package holidays and mobile home sites in France, but we are planning more trips. Actually we now own two tents, the primary reason for this being that our two oldest children have informed us that they are no longer coming on all of our family holidays, they are old enough to remain at home now being sixth formers, which has given us a good excuse to upgrade our tent to a better and smaller model.
Obviously there are a vast amount of tents available from a variety of manufacturers, so some research was in order. We had a list of basic requirements which were that it needed to sleep up to five, have a decent amount of living space, be a tunnel tent and to come from one of the main manufacturers. For this reason we settled on a Vango model, for many years I owned a Force 10 backpacking tent from them which served me well during hiking trips in the National Parks and abroad. I did weight up the choice of inflatable versus standard pole models, but in the end went for a normal model with flexible poles, partly because of the price difference I must admit.
The model settled on was a Vango Avington 500 which is a reasonably priced tunnel tent with a built in ground sheet and a small porch area. So what do you get for your money and how easy is it to put up are the main questions.
Firstly it comes rolled in a bag that will actually fit into the car boot, it weighs in at just under 20kgs, but is manageable to move around as the bag is small enough to get your arms around on carry on your shoulder, it does have carry straps but I certainly would not like to carry it any distance with them.
The tent is tightly rolled, I will never get it to look like that again, with the inner bedroom, curtain, poles and pegs inside it. There are also pitching instructions sewn into the bag or they can be accessed on the Vango website.
Pitching the tent is pretty straight forward, but needs to be dealt with in an methodical manner as with most tents. Once the poles are fitted together they simply slide through the corresponding seams on the flysheet and one end is located into the metal pin system which is attached to the ground sheet. As the tent is erected the same system is used on the other side which should give an equal amount of bend to the poles. Depending on how many people you have available to hold poles you may find it useful to temporarily peg some guy ropes as you go along to keep the structure up. Once it is standing it is just a matter of pegging down everything, clipping the lower parts of the flysheet to the poles with the clips attached and tightening the tension straps for the poles. The bedroom is easy to put in place with a toggle and clip system, a dividing curtain is also supplied. Vango quote a 20 minute pitch time, which might take a bit of practice, but is probably possible. The only problem we cam across was that one of the poles had caught on the seam meaning that it would not bend enough to fit into its metal pin. After some head scratching we realised what had happened, released the caught piece and everything fitted fine, worth watching out for though as it seems like quite an easy thing to do.
The interior is quite an impressive size as you can see and even with the bedroom in place there is still plenty of living space. The straps visible are tension bands which can be tightened in windy conditions to stabilise the tent. They are not required in calm weather and can simply be unclipped and stored it the tent pocket.
Overall then it seems to meet our requirements well, there are side and front entry points, large windows and ventilation flaps, which will all hopefully be beneficial when it is put to the test at the end of the month with its first outing being to Camp Bestival.
Andy
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