Planning on taking a weeks holiday and going over the Alps in September but undecided on tents. Seems a bit silly taking a tent each, would you recommend taking one big tent and possibly splitting the load or a couple of tents?
Any ideas and recommendations on which tents and any other kit would be greatly appreciated. We're planning on keeping it as light weight and as smelly as possible.
Thanks in advance
We got back yesterday from a two week camping trip to the Alps. The best thing we took was a foil emergency blanket which we wrapped round our cool box - it really helped keep it a bit cooler!
Can't help you with tents though, we took a massive tent for two of us, it was great 😆
We took a massive 10 man dome tent and took down all the internal rooms to make it bigger, on the warmer nights we slept outside the tent anyway.
In regards to gear, take one set of every tool you have, its a good idea to take a brake bleeding kit as well. I would definately recommend dual ply tyres and spare brake pads. a spare mech hanger and gear cables are good things to have as well.
Lastly, have an awesome time, I went 4 weeks ago for the first time and it was one of the best experiences of my life!!
Cheers guys, didn't consider bleed kit or foil blanket. Think we're best trying to find a low weight 5/6 man tent.
Vango do good tents for 3-6 persons with various choices of quality/prices, you need to look at their 500 and/or 600 tents. We have an Equinox 450 for 3-4 persons which is excellent as a low mountain type tent, but you could make do with their lower range 'weekend' tents for campsites in the alps, or look at their 'expedition' range if you're back packing. the difficult bit is you can't really split a big tent between you, one or two people will have to carry it, if that's what you are doing.
You don't want to put 5 people in a 5 man tent for a week, unless you're [i]very[/i] friendly. (you could fit 2 people plus kit into my 2 man tent but only if one of them was inside the other)
If you've already got a decent sized one and some smaller ones, that can work well- gives you a communal space for cooking, chilling out etc but somewhere to sneak off to as well. Living in a tent can be a bit fraying if you're not used to it especially if you get any bad weather.
Our five man tent weighs about 18kg.
Sorry, meant to say if you're bike packing^.
you know you can get self catering apartments for 75 Euros ppw week, (or possibly even less in September) right? Last time I checked that was on par with some of the campsites...
Too many choices. I think apartments are out as we're going from Geneva to Milan and trying to organise that in advance might limit us. Maybe 2 tents between us will be better, just got to find them.
This time of year you will find some good deals on tents as they are trying to get shot of stock before the "summer" finishes.
I'd also do the chalet/apartment thing. Some great prices to be had. We paid something like eu20 per person per night for B&B recently near Morzine. That's cheap.