Since we're going to be car camping several days during our upcoming trip, I'm looking for a big 'ol stand up family size tent. Any recommendations? I'd like it to withstand the wind from Superior, not too big or complex to set up. We'll likely be setting it up in the dark, and in the wind, and in the rain, and with no trees to tie it down.
We are heading out to family car camp and day paddle the next couple of weekends. More of an anti-recommendation, although “a big 'ol stand up family size tent” meant something different to me.
When the boys were very young we had a giant two-room cabin tent for car glamping. Like this:
https://eurekacamping.johnsonoutdoors.com/tents/camping/copper-canyon-8-person-tent
The Big House 4 at least has a smaller footprint and a more substantial rainfly. Looking at the poles and sleeves it still looks like a bit of a chore to set up, at least compared to more modern design 4-person domes or vees.
If you don’t absolutely need full walk upright headroom there are much faster set ups dark/wind/rain that don’t require a full on hands-and-knees crawl in. I really don’t like having to sleeve poles atop a non-waterproof wall tent in the rain without some protected “fast fly” set up.
Pros to that big wall tent style:
It was huge, high headroom, walk in and had two “rooms”, so when the boys brought friends along they had their own divided side of the tent with my wife and I the other, with enough walk around space that no one was stepping on/over each other. It had big windows for summer camping ventilation and a large “front porch” awning on the (otherwise scanty) rainfly.
Cons:
It had beefy aluminum poles, which admittedly never bent or broke, but it weighed an absurd amount and was a sizable duffle bag when packed up. It was a chore to pitch and needed a massive footprint to accommodate the floor, which was not always available even on car camping sites, so there were often drainage puddles under the floor (the sheer walls didn’t help drainage in that regard either).
The near vertical sides did not fare as well in strong winds as a dome shape or even a Timberline-ish vee. The integrated awning was far less effective than a similar sized tarp set up separately in a chosen location.
Worst con: After too-few years we stopped using it. The boys soon enough went into their own tent, sometimes tents plural if they bought friends along. The downside to multiple tents was that we sometimes had to pay for two adjacent car camping site with 3 tents (in a pinch we sometimes set two tents end to end and draped a long tarp over both, yup, looks like one tent – 4 feet wide x 20 feet long)
The upside was that in backcountry use it was/is easier to find spots for three smaller tents than for one big one. We are still using some of those smaller tents 20 years later, and it is handy to have several better quality backcountry tents, including one to four person sizes than one big one we rarely had use for.
The boy’s current solution is to bring a spacious two vestibule 3+ person tent and a Hennessey Hammock. They share storage space in the vestibules and, if the site is unhammockable for lack of trees or regulation, they share the tent.
