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Hey all, its been a while since I posted but have still been checking in.

About 3 years ago we got the Vermont XL which was and is a beautiful tent and its served us well on 3 camping trips (a lot less than we would like) but recently we have decided to sell our car due to how much of our budget was being eaten by it with finance, petrol, insurance, standard yearly costs and the fact all of these seem to be rising by an unfair amount year on year.

Because of this we put the XL up for sale on ebay and someone bought it for £450, we also sold our trailer for £150 and camping fridge for £25, calm down there is method to our madness.... :P

We still intend to camp but found the XL difficult to erect in the wind and rain while trying to watch 2 (now 6 and 4) children while we were also having to pay for superpitchs just to site the tent, also the XL's tent bag and poles was massive and took up a huge amount of space, awkward shaped almost cubed bag did not help as did the larder fridge.

We looked into the largest hire car we could arrange for each weeks holiday and how much it would cost and found for a week (8 days) for what we need about £ 300 to £350 would suffice for a large 7 seater( this also comes with a roofbox in the price ) This gave us a size of space to work with for new gear.

twice a year this would cost us about £700 with maybe £150 diesal so £850 wghich is way cheaper than the 4K we were spending having a car each year, before we sold the car we discussed all this with the hire car company and they had no issues.

So now we get to the fun part.....

We WANT a new tent and we like the idea of a small 4/5 man polycotton

After much deliberation and trawling the internet we found most of the tents this year from rivals of outwell seem to have no real soul, there is nothing which stands out bar the new vango airbeams, which were a serious consideration for us until we started reading the horror stories of which there seem to be lots.

So its looks like we will be sticking with Outwell.

We have narrowed it down to 3 tents which we really like and they are

1.Trout lake

2. Maui Reef

3. Bear lake 4

We have opinions on all of these tents but we would rather hear others opinions on them first before we taint any outcome.. one of these most likely will be bought before the end of the year as prices will be cheaper if we can get any end of season stuff in Sept/Oct.

We appreciate any response :P

Have you thought about Cabanon, they still do the Biscaya 370 in "All Season Polyester" which is a little like "PolyCotton" but arguably is a stronger and longer lasting canvas.

Also they do a similiar tent the Awaya 370 in Old Skool "Cotton" but like our Biscaya 370 "Cotton" (no longer made) is a lump of a tent when packed.

Caseys have a good display of the Cabanon tents, although I think Don Valley camping, would be your nearest to see a Cabanon.

Got ours from Catterick Caravans back in 2008, who may have stopped doing the Cabanon tents now.

http://www.caseysoutdoorleisure.co.uk/cabanon-tents-305-c.asp

damn wrong forum lol thx for that ill post it there instead :P

And Zantos we havent decided yet what we want but message me a price and it might decide for us ;)

As for cabanons too rich for my blood m8 :P

No probs m8, think I saw it as ive been looking, did you manage to end the auction early to avoid fees or did you get stung