Help me buy a tent!!

[Good Ol Gal]

We are thinking of camping our next trip to WDW.. Dec 2006.

We don't have a tent, so I was hoping that my fellow DISers could recommend some good tents. There are 6 of us total, so we would probably want a "family" size tent.

What is important when you're looking for a tent? What type of material? It has been known to rain at WDW , so how do you handle that?

TIA for all the info!

 

[clkelley]

Whew, that's a hard one. Tents are actually such individual things. One rule of thumb. Whatever the tent says it will hold, divide that by at least in half.

Those numbers mean sleeping bags only and no gear, and everyone crammed in.

You say there are six of you, how old are the children, and what's the combination of girls and boys??

Will you be using air mattresses, cots, or camping pads??

Will you have a vehicle that will work as a handy storage area??

For example, for my week - two week Ft. Wilderness trips, I use a 3-room 13x13 Coleman all by myself. I sleep in the main room on a cot, one of the side rooms has my clothing and the other side room, I set up my laptop and digital camera docking station.

If all of us were to actually camp together, me and hubby would use the 3-room tent together, and each of my boys would have their own 9x9 smaller dome tent.

As far as material, most of the tent manufacturers use about the same material. Whatever you purchase, I would recommend setting it up at home ahead of time. Seal all of the seams with seam sealer and spray the material with a waterproofing spray such as Scotchguard. (The camping section at Wal-Mart sells a spray on sealer that is less per can than Scotchguard and works well).

Also purchase a roll of 6mil plastic from the painting section of Wal-Mart, Home Depot, or Lowes and cut two sheets out of it that is one inch smaller all the way around than the bottom of your tent. One goes underneath your tent and one goes inside. Don't allow any to stick out under the bottom edge of your tent.

Make sure the rain fly covers a significant portion of your tent and covers the entrance so that doors and windows can be left cracked even when raining.

If you close up a tent too tightly, you will create more moisture inside just from breathing than any rain shower could.

In addition to the tent, purchase some type of outdoor shelter or screen house for lounging in your chairs outside of your tent, or to put over the picnic table. Putting this at the entrance to your tent allows you to remove shoes and raingear outside the tent and enter your tent in the dry.

 

[korbbec]

I agree with everything clKelly said. You need twice the room the tent will say you need (at least). I have a "6" man tent. It holds me, my DBF, our queen size air mattress and gear with very little room left to move. No space for even 1 more person. Also you should def have air mattresses if staying for more than a night or two. Cheap swimming pool rafts will work for smaller children. Since you are not leaving until December you should wait until aug/sept to buy a tent- I paid $40 at sears for a $200 tent on clearance. Like clKelly said, you will want a sheet of plastic/tarp under the tent to help with ground moisture, but tents really do stay dry these days. We also slant a tarp over the tent away from the entrance to take rain water out of the way and allow us to keep the flaps open for ventilation- there are few things more miserable than being stuck in an overheated, terribly humid tent with no option of ventilation. My last word of advice would be to get a tent that you can stand up in, at least in the center. It is so hard to get dressed when you can't stand.

 

[PenskeSth1]

We have a nice Jeep Cabin tent It is pretty big and has 2 closets. We camp with the cub scouts once a month and prefer something roomy. We got ours at Sams last year. There are 4 of us. We use 2 queen size air mattresses. It has a large room in the front that we put all our containers with food and cooking gear.

Edited to add...If you buy from Sam's they are pretty good about replacing if you are unhappy for any reason (KEEP YOUR RECEIPT)..Also Jeep has a customer service # you can call different parts have different warranty's..I just ordered a new top pole because it broke.

 

[maxiesmom]

My advice would be to not buy a tent because it is cheap. You want a good quality one so stick with the name brands. Coleman is good, so is Eureka. I currently have a Eureka and it is great. I have gone thru some big rainstorms in that tent with no leaks. It is also very easy to set up. My Eddie Bauer tent was horrible. It leaked no matter what I did to seal it and it was rather complicated to put up. I am so jealous you get to camp at Disney, have a great time!

 

[momrek06]

Both my DS' are EAGLE SCOUTS with the BSA and they have been camping for YEARSSS.

LLBEAN!! That IS the best place to buy a tent. Call them up and request a TENT catalog. When you get it in the mail, go through each page and decide what looks the best in size and style for your family needs.

100% guarantee for the tent if anything goes wrong with it ANYTIME at all....even 20 years from now you can exchange it or have it repaired by their tent specialists if anything goes wrong with it at all.

We probably have 5 of their tents. As my kids grew up they were always camping and always wanting to upgrade the current tent they had.

 

[doubletrouble_vb]

I just bought a Sportz dome tent I'm going to test out in a couple of days... It says it sleeps four and is 6ft high in the center. It has a sleeve that connects to my Pontiac Vibe so that you could either leave your stuff in it or sleep in the car. They also make larger ones to connect to mid-size SUV's and an even bigger one for full size SUV;s and minivans.

Editted to add: I think the size tent I have would work for two people but that's it...maybe a third person if they are small.

 

[thelionqueen]

We bought a FABULOUS Jeep family 3 room tent @ Sam's club a couple of years ago and LOVE IT!!

It was really easy to set up, had a moon roof, easy zip windows (and lots of them which I love) a screen room and hanging storage. It works perfect for us and it was under $200.00

 

[OK GRUMPY]

I would make sure that the rain fly allows you to keep your windows open a crack when it rains. Cross ventilations is great!! Some of these rain flys just go to the window or just to the door so you won't be able to keep the open even a crack if it rains. This allows you to leave your windows open a little bit and you have some protection if it rains and your at the park. I have an old Gander Mountain dome tent which has been very good for us for 15yrs. Good Luck!!

 

[TomM]

LLBean do make some great tents with excellent return policy and they stand behind their goods. Eureka and Cabelas make some great tents also.
A good tent will cost but a lot less headaches and keeps you dry. A good tent is about the price of one night at the Wilderness Lodge during the regular season. I've used a small Bean tent in Alaska, Sierras in California and Indiana ... always dry. My advice would be to save for a good tent. You might want to check out Campmor.com They often have good tents on sale.
Have fun shopping
Tom

 

[Twende]

Another thing to keep in mind is what are your intents with your tent?

A tent that is backpacked is completely different than one you put in the back of a van.

One of our children is very tall and he wanted to be able to stand up so height of the tent was very important to us.

We have one old standby that is over 30 years old and is still as good as the day we bought it. It is canvas and heavy to carry but it stands up well to a good wind and does great in the rain. We have always been careful to use a ground cloth and police the ground well for sticks, stones and pine cones before setting down the coth and setting up the tent.

We have another tent that is newer and is nylon material. I know it will never last as long as the old one but we are enjoying it. It has three rooms. One is 12' x 12' and the side rooms are 8' x 12'. We can sleep 6 or more in it quite comfortably and allow for gear too.

It's real down fall is in the rain. It leaks pretty bad despite everything we are tried to seal it with. We finally bought a large tarp to suspend over it when rain is expected and that has solved the wet problem plus it gives us a little porch area outside the tent to sit and enjoy the rain and place our shoes.

We never wear shoes in our tents and we always carry two small throw rugs that we place in the doorway, one inside and the other outside the tent.

We carry a small broom to sweep the floor before we roll the tent up and we never put a wet tent away. If we have to pack a wet tent we unpack it as soon as we get home and let it dry out.

We now use air matresses for sleeping but for years we rolled up carpet padding and used that under our sleeping bags. I will admit the air matresses are nice. We use an inflator but you can use a hair dryer that has a cool air feature if you have electircity.

I bought a few of the battery operated tent lights that fasten with magnets to the tent. They work great and allow you to see very well inside the tent without fooling with electic lights. I stretch a rope in one of the areas to allow for clothes to hang on hangers.

When we do have electric I string Christmas lights around our site. It makes it festive and easy to find our way to our site late at night. You can hook them to a timer and your resting area will look very welcoming after a long day of vacation.

A screen tent is a great idea. We love ours. Do make sure that you practive putting up whatever you get. Our friends took the funniest video of us trying to set up a new screen tent one very late arrival night. It was a riot!

 

[clkelley]

Another note, along with practicing to put it up, also be sure to put it and any screen house/shelter you have up CORRECTLY.

That means staking everything down, stake down all guy wires, etc.

Many of the new instant set up tents and self-supporting dome tents make it tempting not to stretch it out and stake everthing down.

Not doing that greatly reduces your tent's ability to stay dry.

I've seen two instant set up canopies next to each other, one was staked down properly, the other wasn't. A large rain storm came up. The instant canopy that wasn't staked down collapsed under the weight of the water because the tarp sank in. The one that was staked down and had the guy wires tight allowed the water to drain off the sides and it was fine.

I've also seen many Scouts too lazy to stake down their tent cause "the weather is fine". They ended up wet, or their tent started blowing across the field, or something.

 

[leprechaun]

All the above advice is great. The key is finding one that is the best you can afford. Duh right? If you can only afford a quality tent that can fit just your family w/out your "stuff" then get that tent and keep your gear in the car. In the future maybe you could buy another tent as your family gets older you can spread out.
My wife and I had a borrowed Hillary when we started than the kids came and we bought a 10x13 Eureka before we bought the truck camper. My son and I are still ground dwellers w/scouts, we have two two man Kelty's and an 8x8 LLBean. It was done over years. You don't have to rush to get everything at once.

 

[doubletrouble_vb]

Okay I tried out the Sportz tent last weekend w/my sister and we loved it! The only problem (so far) was that it was VERY windy overnight the second night and I couldn't tell if the tendency of one wall of the tent to press down was abnormal. We did stake down the tent but its possible we didn't do the best job with it. Or maybe it was the stakes themselves...they were smooth metal jobbers that I thought were kind of questionable.