These smart camping gadgets changed my festival experience forever
I love camping, especially when attending music festivals, but I’m no longer the young man I once was, happy to battle with a cheap tent in a muddy, rain-lashed field, sleeping on a gossamer-thin mat with an inflated bag from an empty wine box as a pillow. These days, I like a bit of comfort and convenience, so when I snagged tickets for Glastonbury, one of the largest festivals in the world, I decided to look into bringing some smart camping gadgets that would – let’s be honest – stop me from dying.
OK, that might be a bit dramatic, but I wanted to be comfortable. Is that too much to ask? Well, thanks to modern camping technology, for five hazy days I lived like a kind of Lord of the Tents in a Somerset field.
Here’s a rundown of what I took on my camping trip, and how it helped me live my best high-tech life (while also enjoying the festival).Tent: Decathlon 2 Man Blackout Tent
Can a tent be smart? Surely it’s just a piece of fabric to keep you warm and dry? Well, if you think ‘smart’ has to mean ‘internet connected’ then sure, it’s probably quite hard to find a smart tent.
But if something has a clever design that makes your life easier, surely that’s smart as well – even if there’s no need for Wi-Fi, a battery or any kind of high-tech gubbins.
That’s why I picked the Decathlon 2 Man Blackout Tent, as it comes with a unique design that allows it to be set up in, as Decathlon promises, just two seconds.
In the past, I’ve found the process of setting up a tent to be one of the worst things about camping, closely followed by the process of taking the tent down. So, if the Decathlon 2 Man Blackout Tent can speed up the process and give me more time to crack open the lukewarm cocktails, then I’m all for it!
It comes in a compact and easy-to-carry case, and when you unravel it, you simply place it on the floor and pull a string on each side, which almost instantly pops up the tent. It’s a lot like opening an umbrella. Amazingly, if you have a person on each end to pull the ropes, it really does take two seconds to set up. You then just need to hammer in the tent pegs.
It’s not the biggest tent in the world, which meant some of my gear had to be stored in a separate awning, but the speed and ease of setting it up was seriously impressive.
Perhaps even better, the “Fresh & Black technology” kept the inside of the tent pretty much pitch black, so it kept cool throughout the day, and meant I wasn’t woken up as soon as the sun rose in the morning.
Collapsing the tent at the end of the festival was perhaps even easier – you just press two buttons and then roll it all up. This was one of the most impressive bits of kit I brought with me, as it was well built, easy to use and genuinely made one of my least favorite aspects of camping a piece of cake.
While this exact tent isn’t available in the US, there are a variety of other options at Decathlon, and Amazon has a great selection of similar tents.Mattress: iDOO Inflatable Airbed with Built-in Pump
After a hard day hiking/walking/standing/drinking/dancing, I want to come back to some comfort, especially at an event as huge as Glastonbury. So, I wanted to bring along an air bed that would keep me comfy, wouldn’t deflate, and would be easy to set up (there’s a theme here; I’m lazy).
So, I brought along the iDOO Inflatable Airbed with Built-in Pump. I loved the look of it, as unlike previous airbeds I’ve tried, this was tall – which meant I would be lifted well above the ground, making it easy to get in and out of bed, while also keeping me from feeling all the rocks and hard ground beneath me.
It also comes with a built-in pump, which makes packing easier. One thing to note is that the pump isn’t battery-powered, so you need to plug it into a power source. If you’re camping somewhere with electricity hookups, or near your vehicle, then that’s fine – but if you’re camping off the beaten track, then that could pose an issue. Luckily, I had a solution (which I’ll get to in a moment).
When hooked up to power, you turn a knob and the mattress starts inflating by itself – so no need to tire myself out using a foot pump, and plenty of time for another cocktail! It only took around two minutes to fully inflate, but there was another (slight) issue – the double iDOO Inflatable Airbed with Built-in Pump is BIG when full of air.
