[Closed] What family tent?

A mate has the Outwell Montana p, I have the Vermont lp. Both are fantastic tents, loads of space, lots of Windows and aren't too hard to put up or take down. Both extremely heavy though. Mine weighs 50kg over 2 bags! I don't put it in the loft anymore

If she needs a mahoosive tent, she'll also need a mahoosive amount of stuff to fill it.

Trust me. 8 man Vango Tigris here. 🙄

I would go as small/light/quick to erect as you can get away with unless you are absolutely certain you will be mainly using it for whole weeks holidays. We started with a massive Khyam and have reduced sizes 3 times over the years so we now use a 2 bedroom pop up 4 man tent.
Always found Decathlon tents to be great quality and value.

Qube tents look interesting and you can make them as huge as you like, aestheticly they look a bit odd.

We have an Outwell Montana 6 which is great and my other half loves it. Really well built, fairly easy to put up but it is massive and if we have to pack it wet then its too big to dry in our garden so we have to take it to the local park to dry it out in the sun.

The Outwells are well made. We would buy another one

we have an outwell nevada M that we'd sell with the extension canopy. may be a bit too small for 6 tho, depends if you wanted to go a bit smaller than montana or not.

if it were me, id be looking at a vermont for 6 people, but as mentioned up there ^^^, tis a big old unit.

I have a vango 5 person tent, and bought the extendable porch. I've found that it's the porch space that's often most useful, especially if needing to sit inside when it's raining. With the extra porch there's lots of space, with the option of just taking the tent for shorter / definitely dry weekends. I'd echo comments above regarding smaller and lighter, both in terms of fitting into a car and ease of pitching or drying. Ours was from Go Outdoors and was about 400 for the tent, 150 for extended porch.

Just a suggestion* - maybe consider going sturdier/smaller and get an add-on event shelter/tarp for cooking/eating? You only really need on holidays to sleep in a tent so those hectares of nylon tunnel 'living space' are a waste of time, hassle, money and site-space unless you are possibly OCD outdoors/camping-phobic families of 8? Kids/young adults go in pup tents unless toddlers then they go with parents.

* some years spent helping run campsite and speaking to seasoned camping families

my mates went old school at the weekend, must admit, if you could be arsed carrying all the stuff, it's a great idea, the stove was bloody awesome, particularly around -2C at midnight! 😆 I was seriously tempted just to sleep in the camping chair rather than return to my wee tent that was actually frozen inside!

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I have an Outwell Nevada. It's an amazing tent, really well made and a brilliant design. Other 'family' tents have always had some niggling design flaw or other that's peed me off. The last one I had I was so hacked off with I threw it in the skip in a fit of pique on leaving the campsite. My one gripe with the Nevada it is it's a bit of a sod to pitch.

Oh, also, check reviews on ukcamping.

URL-walking, I found this:

http://singletrackmag.com/forum/topic/what-family-tent

Where are you. I'll have a well used bear lake 6 for sale soon. I'm in Devon.

IME if you're going car-camping then just buy a big enough tent that:

1 you can easily stand-up in
2 all of you can be in and it's not crowded
3 you can cook and eat at the same time
4 accept it rains, so see 1-3

And who cares how big/heavy it is, just make sure it's not too big/heavy that you and the OH can't put it up easily.

We bought a steel-poled 3-season Wild Country Homestead 5 tent a fair few years ago. Bloody brilliant.

MoreCashThanDash - Member
If she needs a mahoosive tent, she'll also need a mahoosive amount of stuff to fill it.

Sounds familiar...

Theres a really good 2nd hand jack wolfskin family tent on eBay at the mo

In defence of my good lady wife, the footprint and carpet have been great.

I'm not convinced that the four of us need an 8 man tunnel tent. And the enclosed porch as well.

3 x 2 man tents and a small gazebo? No having the kids in my tent would be ace, not sure my wife would agree...

Thanks for all the suggestions. I have several 1 - 4 man tents but the boss wants one as big as a house. I'm not too bothered by packed size or weight as it will only ever be used for car camping in the uk and europe.

Anyhoo, I've just won a 1 year old used once Montana 6p with extention, footprint and carpet for £450 on fleabay. Just a 300 mile round trip tomorrow to pick it up.