Hi Fuzzy,
I spent years wanting a camper trailer and spent countless nights under a tent. So we were pretty well set with what we wanted. I was so tired of being the first to start packing up and the last to leave with all those CT's just folding away a small house in 10 minutes.
Rather than tell you what to do, I'll tell you what we bought and why.
Originally I wanted a big arse tent 18" or so thinking the space would be good. Amazingly, we ended up settling on a Johnno's Off Road Extreme which is only a 9" tent !!! The reason for this was how unbelievably quick it is to set up. The smaller tents have no upright poles inside making them MUCH easier to put up by yourself or with 1 person. The trade off of course is space.
The awning is permanently attached and importantly, it includes a side wall over the kitchen and has a window in it. This was a major bonus for us. Because the main tent is smaller, the awning is easier to manage. It's still big, but it is manageable quite easily.
SO to solve the space issue, we bought the "Sleep Out" extra room. This zips on to the main tent on the other side from the awning. It can also be a free standing tent if the kids want to sleep away from us. The beauty of this is that for overnight stops, it's about a 10 minute job and we can jump in to bed. If we base camp for a week or so we will set up the extra room.
With the main tent, the awning and then the sleep out, we have more space than we have ever had and we lugged around a whopping big tent and tarp !!!
Now on to the extra things. KITCHENS !!!! This was probably our main reason for buying the Johnnos. The kitchen is awesome. 4 burner stove, grille, electric start, permanently plumbed gas with a shut off valve (turn turn the bottle on, open the lever and you are cooking !! No connecting bottles. There's a permanently plumbed stainless steel sink and electric pump tap not a hand pump. 2 drawers complete the kit. Awning and wall over the top and it is a great set up.
There are a stack of other things I could go on about, but rather than complicate things I wanted to keep it simple. #1 for us was the MAIN tent as this is what you need to put up every single time even for short stops. #2 for us was kitchen as I didn't want to spend 15 minutes setting up the tent then 2 hours setting up all the other crap. The awning is easy and has a wall but if you want the flexibility of being able to add walls etc for longer stays, you'll need some sort of structure and support.
Anyway, hope all this helps. I'm incredibly happy with our purchase so take any opportunity to talk about it.
At the end of the day, buying something we were very very happy with is encouraging us to get out in it at every opportunity.
I'm only new here too and posted up some photos of our setup. There are some good photos of the kitchen and the awning.
Oh and Johnnos hires out if you wanted to have a play with one.
Cheers and best of luck,
Jason.
