What makes a great family tent?

The best family tents need to be big with multiple rooms.

The best family tents need to be big with multiple rooms. Source: Wikipedia

The best family tents need to serve the purpose of several family members who are of different sex and age. The best family tents also need to be big, yet easy to set up. With all of these needs in mind the best family tent is hard to come by. This article will give you a few ideas on how to find that tent that is perfect for you and will enable your family to experience the beauty of camping.

First of all, no two family tents are created equal. A family tent for four people is going to be very different than a tent for twice as many people. A family tent of four people can have only a single room, while a tent for eight people must have multiple rooms. one room is not going to provide enough space for so many people to sleep in comfortably. For example the Kelty Grand Mesa is an excellent four person tent, but it has only one room, where all the people need to sleep.

The way you can make multiple rooms out of a tent with a single inner space is by either install a wall, or installing a plastic sheet that will serve as a removable wall between two rooms. You can install as many of these walls as you want, you only need to find a material that you can use to attach the plastic sheet to the wall of the tent. Don’t pierce through the fabric, it is going to make your tent useless and leaky after a while.

A really nice feature of great family tents is a porch. Some family tents have a wall or fly that reaches over the door of the tent, forming a porch. These areas are so handy when you want to enjoy a nice drink with your friends and your loved ones.

If your tent doesn’t have a porch, chances are that it has a screening room. Such a room is an area covered with mesh walls from the sides and with a plastic fly from the top. It doesn’t have a floor however, so it is only fit for sitting, talking, and cooking. You can always put down a tar under the screen room, which is going to make it waterproof, but that way you can’t cook in it.

Great family tents also need to have a solid structure. This is a must as it will have to endure a lot thanks to multiple people running in and out of the tent all the time. With this in mind the best family tents have aluminium poles, the fiberglass poles are prone to breaking if you use them on multiple camping trips.

The best family tents also need to have a window, or multiple windows. The more windows the tent has, the better. The windows contribute to ventilation a lot and they help clear all the unwanted scents out of the tent.

Conclusion

When you are choosing your family tent, think about what that tent is going to be used for. It needs to provide a shelter for a host of people, it needs to be durable and it needs to be big enough so that all your family can stay in it comfortably. And of course you need to enjoy your stay in it a lot, an awful lot. If you keep these in mind, you are bound to choose the right family tent.

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