As I told you when I came in the other day, you don’t need to convince me you tents are great, you are talking to the converted!
Our friends told us the "only" tent to buy was a freedom camping tent. We went to the store, saw the prices and left. The local tent shop had something much closer to our price range and I thought they looked nicer too.
Our first weekend with the four wheel drive club had us putting up our tent in the dark. I was sure we had left half the poles behind as nothing fitted. The support strings were all tangled, we were tired and of course missing half the equipment. Luckily the kids who know everything managed to put the tent together. As we are still struggling with the poles a quick look around saw the rest of our group comfortably sitting around the fire sipping wine and having a good time. We were stressed, tired and NOT happy.
After an hour we finally made it to the cosy fire and the question on our lips was "OK guys, how did you get yours up so fast?" The answer was they all had freedom tents. They all assured us it was the best investment they had made and if we did the same we would not regret it.
We started looking in the trading post and could not find the tent we wanted. Whilst there are numerous tents advertised, there were very few Freedom Tents.
We decided to bite the bullet and get one. Desperate to justify out expenditure we hastened to put it up in the back yard with the timer running. From car to fully up was 7 mins and this included putting in the pegs twice (for reasons only city slickers like us would understand). We were impressed.
Now a year later a few trips under out belt, the most recent being around the Simpson Desert – 3 1/2 weeks of daily up and down with the tent. We just feel embarrassed at the thought of the "cheap tent" and glad only a few people witnessed our fiasco with it. Our cheap tent was flattened and the skeleton rods snapped to pieces during a gusty spurt on the snowy mountains, and had to be tied to the freedom tent to keep it upright. We are now purchasing our second tent for the children to replace the cheap tent we passed down to them!
