If you’re not familiar with LoveTheSales.com, let me introduce you. It’s a discount website that links you through to the best deals and savings other shops are having. Say you need a sleeping bag, rather than trawling all the shops you know to see if they might have a sleeping bag on offer, you can just head to Love the Sales, see all the discounted products in the same place, and make your choice from there. It saves hours of trawling through high street and branded websites and saves you money to boot. What’s not to like!?
As we’re right between two camping trips at the moment, I know I need to make a few purchases myself, so I’ve been browsing Love The Sales. A hard shell roof top tent is a great option for anyone looking for a durable and reliable camping experience. These tents are made with a heavy-duty fabric and a hardshell roof, which makes them perfect for rough terrain or bad weather. They’re also easy to set up, so you can be up and camping in no time.
Here are some of my favourite finds:
Don’t like to camp because sleeping on the floor is no fun? Well, how about a double raised air bed? It’s as high as a normal double bed, and as comfortable. Make sure you get a good one so you don’t end up bouncing your skinny partner/child off the bed in the middle of the night, and spend the extra money on an electric or battery operated pump, and you’ll be camping in style, away from any creepy crawlies!
Camping doesn’t have to be hard work, and while a foot pump in your mattress may be a greatwork out, it can be exhausting, especially if you have to top up every day! I bought an electric pump, not realising it had to be plugged in and when you’re wild camping you don’t always have access to a car cigarette lighter or electric point, so I had to buy a battery operated one too. But if you can, get an air pump that’s rechargeable. That way you pay a little extra in the beginning, but you don’t have ongoing costs for batteries.
Camping’s come a long way from when I was a child and it was all beiges and khakis, “so as not to scare the fish”. Kids can have camping chairs in almost any animal design, and you can bright up the camp site with an endless variety of fun, comfortable or practical camping chairs!
Hate the confined spaces of a triangle tent? I have those memories too – our family of five squashed head to tail foot into a four man tent, slipping off the edge of a double mattress all through the night. With these mini-mansion tents, that’s no longer necessary! You can all have your own rooms, or with some of them, leave out the inner chambers and have one huge, open room to put up the camping equivalent of a Christmas bed and all snuggle together in familial bliss.* Or try something like this to really stand out on the festival camp site so you can be sure you end up in your own tent (or one that looks just like it):
Another top tip for camping, is to take a decent quality flask. Aside from the time it takes to boil the kettle every time you want a cuppa, I always worry that “just one more” cup of coffee is going to leave the whole family without dinner if we run out one day. Unlike the gas at home, the gas stove has a limited supply, so it’s a great idea to boil the water – which you’ve inevitably overfilled for your cup of coffee – and then pour the rest of the kettle into a decent quality flask, for the next cup of coffee. And I say decent as there’s little as soul crushing as reaching for your flask of water only to find it’s already ice cold. Yes, this happened to me just last week! Another tip – don’t have your ‘last drink before bed’ because in the middle of the night that stumble to the toilet is a whole lot further than it was during the day!
*family bliss not guaranteed. For that, I recommend individual sleeping bags!