Do you long to be
an intrepid explorer?
The first step is to cast our eyes over the names of genuine explorers and adventurers to find out if there are any common threads.
Related camping and outdoor news, reviews and advice:
What was your favourite post on the CheapTents Outdoor Gear blog this year? Photocredit: Phil Wickens
As the year draws to a close we like to look back over our blog posts and share our favourites. As ever, we’ve posted some amazing interviews, great gear reviews, insightful outdoor news and thrown in a little bit of fun too!
Related camping and outdoor news, reviews and advice:Deciding what food to take when backpacking can be a difficult task. The major deciding factors being the weight of the food, its taste, longevity, nutrition and your diet. Other considerations are cooking, water and packaging. You may also be concerned about issues such as animal welfare, sustainability and food miles.
Make your camping food taste better! Source: Flickr by Beemans.
Here at CheapTents we love Google Maps and Street View. We are waiting with great anticipation for Google to roll out Street View for mountain trails, which we like to call “Sherpa Cam“. Yet there is still something better than Google Maps and that is Ordnance Survey mapping. The Ordnance Survey National Grid reference system can be used to locate an exact position anywhere in Great Britain. It can be frustrating though, if you want to view a grid reference on a map online. Fortunately the Ordnance Survey website has the answer! It is called Get a Map.
Today we are announcing an Exclusive product created by Cheap Tents.
There aren’t many amongst the hiking and camping community who haven’t noticed the similarity in looks of a water bladder and a hospital drip. They both generally offer hydration to the body, even if the method of entry varies some what.
Something that made this idea come to life was when out testing a tent one weekend, Daniel was seen to hang his Platypus 2L Hoser (along with a lamp) from the inner tent loop. His excuse was it meant he didn’t have to unzip the tent inner to get water from his rucksack and it didn’t go all over the place when he rolled over onto it in the night. A pretty good excuse for the full story, which we learnt later, and led to our innovation that is today’s product.
Related camping and outdoor news, reviews and advice:Father’s day has become over commercialised over the past decade or three. This year we want to break with the idea of selling you something to give to your dad, we all know he has too many ties anyway!
So instead of the usual list of amazing fathers day gifts, this year we want to take a different track. Inspired by a Wired article I recently read encouraging father and child to go to science museums and spend quality geek time together, we here at CheapTents want to encourage you to get out into the countryside around you this GeekDad Day.
Related camping and outdoor news, reviews and advice:Forest Xplorer is the Forestry Commission for England’s free mobile app, for Android and iPhone. The app, which you can download today, is a great little companion app to have with you whether you enjoy a walk in the forest or enjoy camping in the forest.
Forest Xplorer Free Mobile App - Forestry Commission
The app is one of the best guides we’ve seen in the “forest sector”, it has a handy events finder and one of the best features we think is the UK tree identifier utility (more about this later).
Related camping and outdoor news, reviews and advice:Here at CheapTents we love looking at maps! Whilst Ordnance Survey undoubtedly produce the best quality mapping in the UK, Google have provided us with their maps online for free. Combined with Street View and Google Earth, Google Maps is arguably one of the best things on the internet. Not only do Google do great maps, they also like a bit of a laugh and this year for April Fool’s day they have produced 8-bit mapping. For those of us who can remember computer graphics from the 1980s these maps are a bit of a flashback! Below are screenshots of most of England and Wales and East Warrington with Google’s 8-bit mapping. Below that is The Adventure Centre on 8 bit Street View. Awesome!
Related camping and outdoor news, reviews and advice:Have you ever been out hiking and found that when you came down from the fells, you felt that your experience of your walk was not quite as it should have been? Your body feels like you’ve been walking but your memory of the walk is a bit sketchy? We have received an increasing number of accounts like this, to the point that they were causing concern. So we decided to exchange our Lowe Alpine mountain caps for Sherlock Holmes Deer Stalkers and do some amateur sleuthing. We found a shocking truth that we are only now able to reveal…
Related camping and outdoor news, reviews and advice:The family fun begins this weekend with many schools starting their Easter break, though some start their holiday next week. With this in mind we’ve done some digging around and found some great events across the UK in the coming weeks, fun for all the family.
We’ve done our best to segment our list by location (eg Manchester, London, Devon etc) but unfortunately we can’t cover everywhere. So if you can’t see a location near you then scroll to the bottom of this article and we’ve listed some great resources for finding events just like the ones we are listing today.
Related camping and outdoor news, reviews and advice:
