These five tent tips can really help make the most of your tent, and put an end to a miserable and wet nights sleep. Learn to love your tent again.
1. Use your vestibule
We’ve all had one of those nights, when you have to try and sleep with your sleeping bag and tent caked in mud because you took your boots off inside the tent, or with your smelly socks stinking up the tent.
There is a simple way to avoid this, and that it is to use your vestibule. Your vestibule, is like a little foyer for the entrance to your tent, between the outer and inner skins of your tent. This place can be the front line in keeping your tent clean and making the most of your space.
2. Split your inner and outer
This is one for the majority of tents, which have separate inner and outer skins for pitching the tent. For a lot of tents, these will stay clipped together when you put them away, with the wet outer layer soaking into the inner layer. So just keep your inner tent dry, and split up the outer and the inner.
This is great also if you share a tent between two, so you don’t have one person carrying all the weight.
3. Bring a gear store
Try bringing an small extra shelter for your bags and gear when you’re camping. This is for when you’re quite cramped in your tent, and makes a huge difference in terms of space. This may be as simple as a small tarp you use to keep your bags out of the rain. You can even use it to extend your vestibule for tip 1 on steroids.
4. Adjust after pitching
No matter how good you are, no-one gets anything right the first time, so for this tip, make sure you go round and adjust the tent after pitching it. It makes a world of difference to how much flapping in the night, and can give that tiny bit extra headroom to make it a good nights sleep.
5. Get new pegs
As anyone might guess, pegs are not a selling point for tents. This means that on most of tents that you buy, you will get the cheapest (and worst) pegs possible. This might not seem that big of a deal, but better pegs cost almost nothing at all. And they make a huge difference when you get to that rocky campsite.