If you like camping and own a pickup truck or an SUV, you may have spent several trips looking for just the right campsite, complete with flat, stable ground, tent pegs, and other accessories when planning the perfect camping trip. But there is another way! If you buy a truck bed tent, you can say goodbye to most of the hassles of searching for campsites, including insects that live on the ground and have nothing else to do besides relentlessly attack your tent. Here are some of the more important things you should consider if you’re planning on buying a truck bed tent to take along with you on your next camping expedition.
Consider versatility. The typical truck bed tent on the market will be designed for a particular kind of truck; some will be designed for trucks with lift gates, while others will specify requirements for trucks with drop gates. Some will require trucks with short beds, while others will require trucks with long beds, or camper tops, and so on. You can take this route and match the truck bed tent to your truck. However, a select few truck bed tents have been designed with versatility in mind; you can use these on all sorts of vehicles, including cars. Typically, a versatile truck bed tent will have some sort of attachment to the rooftop of the vehicle.
Another element to consider involves durability. How durable a truck bed tent is, particularly within the domains of water proofing, wind proofing, and storm proofing, will affect the comfort you experience inside the truck bed tent when the weather is stormy or windy or raining or hailing. Perhaps just as importantly, the durability of the truck bed tent will also affect the overall lifetime of the tent. If you consider your truck bed tent to be an investment, then it may be worth looking into models with higher storm ratings, as these may last you years longer than truck bed tents designed solely for fair weather camping.
Another consideration when buying a truck bed tent involves the exterior dimensions and weight of the tent. A larger truck bed tent may provide more space and accommodations, but it will come at the expense of more difficulty in both setting up and tearing down the tent, not to mention storage. It may be a good idea to try the tent on your truck, if the seller allows it, to determine the amount of time you will need to put it together and take it apart, and even whether this is a task you can accomplish on your own. You don’t want to find out your truck bed tent requires two people to set up the first time you’re all alone in the wilderness. Additionally, larger truck bed tents will require more storage space when you aren’t using them, and will also take a greater toll on gas mileage when installed on the bed of you truck or SUV.
Finally, consider the interior capacity of your truck bed tent. While most truck bed tents are designed to accommodate two adults, some may imply they can fit three. Consider lying down inside your truck bed tent before purchasing it to obtain a better idea of its actual size, particularly before you go camping.
In the end, if you want to buy a truck bed tent, you have plenty of options to choose from in today’s market. You can even buy some tents to go well with cars! However, most truck bed tents will have the same limitation: they are typically designed to fit only two adults at most, and interior space will be limited. However, if you can get past this limitation, you will have the convenience of being able to set up camp anywhere, and at any time, without having to deal with hordes of insects and ground-dwelling animals curious about your ground-based tent.