Monday, Aug 10, 2009 at 19:43
I would highly recommend the roof-top tent option if you are moving every day or two. The biggest downside is when you want to set up a 'base
camp' for a few days and make short trips in the car each day you have to pack it all up every day. I know many people will tell you it only takes 5min, but you may want to time them for the complete procedure - INCLUDING putting the cover on/off! Realistically, I could set it all up (or pack up) in 10min after some practice - this was total time from
parking the car to having the bed made, or from crawling out in the morning to being ready to drive off. It doesn't sound like much, but if you're set-up in a town and just want to duck down the road for fish-n-chips etc., it can be annoying. It wasn't a problem for my travelling because I rarely stayed in towns, and then I was usually moving on within 2 days anyway. On most of my longer travels, I never had the luxury of a nice grassy site to pitch a regular tent - the rooftop tent was always very comfortable regardless of what I was parked on (sand, sticks, rocks, etc.!). Importantly, Mrs liked it too!
Here is a picture of my tent mounted so it would open to the rear of the car which provided shelter over the back doors (I think this is the most common way).Image Could Not Be Found
As can be seen, the tent has an extra extension over the ladder (unlike the
picture of the Simpson tent on the ARB website)
I tried out the annex one day at
home - here is a picture of the tent set up with the annex. Image Could Not Be Found The yellow arrow indicates the area where the water would collect. The roof extension had two guy ropes to peg into the ground - usually if these were tight enough the water wouldn't
pool on the roof, but if the water started to
pool it the roof would sag more under the weight so more water would collect, and so on.....!
The Howling Moon was made in South Africa (as I think many of the roof-top tents are/were - and where I understand the idea/concept came from). Howling Moon was originally sold by Open Sky but I don't think they sell them anymore.
Any more questions, feel free to ask. BTW: Posting a follow-up will send an email only to that person, so if you want to ask further questions to something that someone else has said, you would have to post a 'follow up' on their comments.
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