Words To Publish

Anyone who has camped before knows how much space is a commodity, particularly when it comes to your camping tent.  If you’ve never been camping before you will realize it very soon, so when you go to choose between different affordable tents, its size should be one of the most important things you consider. 
The size of your tent has a lot of impact on your camping experience.  Its weight can weigh you down while hiking and the dimensions can limit how much you can fit inside and how comfortably you sleep.  The first thing you need to know is that the companies that manufacture tents generally give a number that corresponds with the amount of people they think should fit inside the tent.  Is that always accurate?  Usually it isn’t.  You may indeed be able to fit 3 people in a 3 person tent but you might not be able to move around at all and all of the things you brought with you might be sitting outside due to lack of space.  In general, you will want to get a size a little bigger than the amount of people you think you might need to sleep inside.
Next, really think about what you are going to bring with you.  Do you want to bring something to sleep on, lots of clothes or other things.  If that is the case you will need a lot more space than the tent says it can fit.
Another question you need to ask yourself is how you are actually going to get to the campsite.  Is it car accessible or are you going to have to backpack into it?  This will affect what size you need in a different aspect than just how many people can sleep in it.  You will now need to consider how much it will weigh.  When you are staying at a site that is easily accessible it probably won’t matter much.  But you aren’t going to want to be lugging in a 40 pound tent if you have to hike 10 miles to your campsite.  It just isn’t very reasonable.  In this case, you may need to go with a smaller tent than you might like ,but you most likely will already be traveling with less stuff so you won’t need as much room.  When you hike into a campsite see if it is an option to shift the weight around by splitting up the tent into different parts so you can put them in different people’s bags.  This allows the weight to be spread out to different people without one person getting left carrying all of the weight.  Many tents will make this easier by giving you separate bags for different parts of the tent.  Whatever you do just make sure you don’t lose any of the pieces or the instructions to set it up!