This is my tent. It’s a Eurohike 225 TS which my grandad gave me for my fifteenth or sixteenth birthday, which makes it fourteen or fifteen years old. It’s in more or less perfect condition and up until a year ago, even the pegs were perfect. Last year, my idiot Rangers managed to mix their bent, abused pegs up with my ancient but straight ones and I now have a mixture. This year I’ve found one of the pole sections has cracked – not enough that I can’t put the pole together but enough to see that it’s damaged.
I love my tent. I do. It’s served me well and I want to keep using it because it’s almost everything I need in a tent for the one or two times a year it comes out. But…
Well, at Wellies & Wristbands, it rained a few times. And one morning, I found myself deliberately standing out in the rain (in full waterproofs) rather than going back into the tent. My tent doesn’t have a porch and in rainy weather, I really wish it did.
It’s a great tent on sunny days and even on dull days. But it really suffers for that lack of porch in the rain. It’s completely flat-fronted and if you open the outer door, water will drip down straight onto the inner door or straight inside the tent if you’re opening both doors in order to get in or out and when it’s closed, the outer door sticks to the inner door. It’s not ideal. I watched the Rangers in their porch, storing wet stuff, sitting in there to shelter from the sun, having a living room of sorts. I wish I had one.
So I was starting to think that the time has come to invest in a second two-man tent. It feels a bit ridiculous for one person to own three tents but the one-man has a specific purpose – when I need a tent small and light enough to take on a plane. My little blue tent, my baby, my favourite, will still come out when the weather is good.
The new one will be another Eurohike – my one has stood the test of time and Millets are selling them off cheap and I really don’t need a high-spec expensive tent – but it’s a tunnel one with a porch almost as big as the main bedroom with an almost-proper door on each side. Life of luxury for me on Guide camp from now on!