Hi people. We have this tent!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
We have pitched it twice so far. I nearly fell off my chair with laughter when someone said they had been advised that it takes 45 minutes to pitch first time, but it get's quicker with experience.
Before this, we had a Vango Colorado 600DLX. (A dome tent, with three pods and a tunnel entrance.) We got this pitching time down to 20mins. So we are not complete novices. However, on our first pitching, we arrived on site at 5pm and finally got around to lighting the BBQ at 9pm. (Obviously that included unloading all the other gear and doing airbeds, camp cooker, etc, etc. The majority of the time was pitching though)
Today, we pitched the tent for the second time in our garden (to dry out, as we had to pull down in the rain). This took us an hour and half, but no ground sheets or bedrooms. Some of this time was deliberating the best way to do things and faffing with the guy ropes.
When we pitched the first time, we hardly used any guy ropes at all, as we were itching to get fed and watered, (and there was no wind present). However, when it did rain heavily the next day, the rain did collect in pools of water in the roof, I had to occasionally push up the tent fabric (with a badminton racquet - the only way I could reach) to allow the water an escape down. I think this was possibly due to the state of the pitching though. The tent is much more taut now we have pitched it the second time and I don't think this will be a problem. As we have pitched it in our garden(it was an incredibly tight squeeze), we may leave it there until next weekend and hope for rain, just so we can check this out. If so, I will post again, to let you know.
The negative points are as follows:
1. My husband is 5' 8" and standing on his tiptoes, and his arms severley stretched, he can only just reach the highest woggles that attach the bedrooms to the tent. The cover's on the sky lights are also the same height, therefore these will probably never get used.
2. The pooling of water on the roof, but as I mentioned earlier, I think this was probably down to bad pitching.
3. It is far from an easy tent to pitch, however, we are hoping that after another couple of times, we will have it down to an hour.
4. The pitching instructions on the bag are wrong. Please do not fit your bedrooms before the ground sheet, as the groundsheet goes under them.
5. Bucket ground sheets in general, as they do not give you any flexibility with the pitch of your tent, so you have to get the pitch spot on.
Positive points
1. The canopy was absolutely wonderful. The first evening, we had the odd bit of drizzle, which we so often get in this country, and we just left our camp cooker, bbq, out there permanently and we sat out there in the evening with no need to escape if the light rain did come down.
2. We found having three doors fantastic (the first day of first trip was really sunny and the ventilation was brill.) There are also air vent strips above the windows, so if you wish you can just unclip the first woggle and this allows the window covers to just show the vent strip.
3. There is so much space and so much flat wall, even if you use all the doors, to put your stove, shelves, boxes, or whatever up against.
4. The ability to move the front panel back. We only did this when we saw the tent at the show and it literally took a minute. (We bought it from the Hi-Peak Leisure show at Trentham). We went to the show, knowing that we spend a lot of time camping with friends and we were going to down grade our family tent and buy a day tent too. Thus giving us shelter for cooking and sitting out in the evening, when the kids were asleep in respective tents. However, this one tent, with the movable front panel made it easy for us to do just that, but also perfect when there was just us going as it gave us a lot of space inside and of course, no bending down or ducking through doors etc, etc.which we would have had with the smaller tent.
5. The huge amount of storage pockets, floor to ceiling on the out side of each bedroom and one row, front to back of each bedroom.
6. The way the window covers just fold down into their pockets, is really neat and tidy.
All in all, to date, I love this tent (despite all the cursing on the first pitching). I know pitching will get easier, as we learn from our experience each time. I just think there are a few tricks of the trade and once we have these mastered it will be much better.
When you go to an exhibition though, it is easy to get carried away and not quite realise the size of the tents. I would have preferred a slightly small version of this same tent, but they don't do one.......yet.
The steel poles are much easier to handle than the fibreglass ones and pulling the tent down was much faster than our old Colorado and we managed to fit it in the bag no problem (rain water and all).
Despite the height struggle with the bedrooms, I love the height, it feels really spacious.
Our final aim is to pitch within the hour - but I feel 45 mins too ambitious - but we will see!!!!!!!!!!!!
Finally, knowing what I know about it so far, I would go back to the exhibition and buy the same exact tent. We paid £360 and feel every penny very well spent.
Hope this helps you and anyone else who is tent hunting this season. Good Luck!
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Topic: vango vail 700
