Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Camping stuff - New shower tent

Ugh - still a bit sick from the flu that flattened me over the weekend. So no new exciting news. But I figured it had been too long since I'd put something up, so enjoy the following:

A couple of weeks back BCF was doing a special on shower packages. They bundled a shower tent with a solar shower and some foam floor tiles, and gave a little discount off the package price. Not a great deal of savings, but enough to make it worthwhile. A hot shower whilst out in the bush is a little luxury that we've been missing when we've been out, especially when you go camping with others who have various hot water shower setups, and you need to beg them for a go.

I'm not a huge fan of the solar showers, since you need a reasonable amount of sun to get the water warm, and you've got to remember to put the bag out early in the day, and so forth. But I figured that we would most probably use the shower bag with hot water that we had cooked up on the gas stove, so we just needed a way to hold the water up high, and a shower rose. We were originally looking at something along these lines: Camp Showers , but for $9, we couldn't go past the solar shower bag. Plus at least if it's a sunny day we can use the solar shower as it was originally intended.

But the exciting part of it (if you can get excited about any of this) is the shower tent. I didn't want a pop-up one, as they're annoying to pack up at the best of times, and because there's no rigid structure, there's no place to hang the solar shower. So you then need to set up either under a tree, or come up with some other solution to the problem. Luckily, the shower tent that came in the package was the exact one I've had my eye on - an OzTrail tent with a rigid external frame. It makes putting up/packing up a bit longer, but means we can suspend the solar shower bag from the top of the frame, and it will be strong enough to hold it.

We set it up in the backyard to test it all out, make sure we had received all the bits and pieces, and figure out the best way to put it up. So here's some photos. Best part is it all packs down to a really quite tiny bag, which will go up on the roofracks no problem at all. So all in all, I think it'll work out very well for us. Now, to get a free weekend where we can get away and try it out!