Woods™ - Tente Road Trip SUV, 5 personnes

Love this tent. I am in my second year of using it. The first year I had an suv but have currently changed to a hatchback therefore have not used it to attached to the car. I am able to put it up myself without much trouble. The only adjustment I would make to the tent is to have an deattachable floor for the vestibule . I have velcro a tarp around the bottom of the vestibule to prevent rain from leaking through. During any rain my tent vestibule is the gathering place. We have table and 3 to 4 chairs in it. I like the tunnel aspect of the tent because you are able to stand up any where in the tent. Would recommend it whether you use the attachment to the suv or not.

Overall, I love the tent. The vestibule is so nice, and the connection to the SUV is a terrific feature. The shortcomings I found with it are minor in comparison with the good qualities. I just took it on a 3-day camping trip with my daughter - just the 2 of us, so we weren't pushing the capacity limit by any means. Things I loved: 1. The vestibule area is fantastic - put a tarp down, and it's an extension of the tent. We used it as our changing room, and had 2 camp chairs and a small table for playing games, and there was still plenty of room to move around. 2. With the sleeve attached to the SUV, the vestibule area of the tent feels much larger than with the large end-flap closed. 3. The sleeping tent is spacious enough - we shared 1 queen-sized air mattress, but could have fit 2 quite easily (without too much luggage). 4. I like that the "inner" wall of the sleeping tent - the side facing the vestibule - is vertical (which means the floor space right up to the wall is usable), and you can butt the air mattress up against it without fear of water seeping through (unlike the sloped, weepy walls in my last tent). 5. The inner tent has 2 separate doors into it from the vestibule, so we could get in and out without disturbing each other. 6. There are storm flaps over the zippers (with velcro to hold them in place, on some of the flaps), which are a really nice touch. You just have to be careful not to catch them while opening and closing the door zipper. 7. Having the vestibule limited the number of mosquitoes that could get into the sleeping tent. Always a bonus! 8. The vestibule made a great staging area for packing up the car in the hard rain for the trip home. Thanks to that, the only things that were wet when they went into the car were the outer tent, and the screen house we had over the picnic table. Things that I would improve if I worked for Woods: 1. The tension on the tent from the poles tends to pull the bottom edges of the outer tent up off the ground a bit, making it easy for flying bloodsuckers (aka mosquitoes) to get into the vestibule. A "skirt" around the outer edge, that would normally lie flat on the ground and extend a few inches out from the edge of the tent, would fix that easily. Since we had a beach site, I piled sand along the bottom edge to fill the gaps, which solved the mosquito problem, but that's not an option on many sites. And foot traffic through the door caused the sand there to migrate, so it had to be re-piled often. 2. I had problems with the sleeve slipping off the back of the SUV when I closed the hatch, so I hooked the sleeve around the mud flaps to keep it in place. Unfortunately this required the car to be fairly close to the tent, and since the back hatch of my SUV opens quite wide, it pulled the edge of the outer tent about 5 inches off the ground. I solved this problem by bungee-cording my hatch so it wouldn't open so wide. 3. The screens in the vestibule are quite small - larger screened areas would be nice. We had full afternoon sun on the tent, and it got unbearably hot inside. Since the sleeve zips off completely, a screen that would zip into that space, to allow a lot more air flow, would have been a really nice touch. 4. Inside the sleeping tent, there is a hanging pocket only on 1 side of the tent. It would be nice if both sides had hanging pockets. 5. There are no velcro closures along the bottom of the large end flap that covers the SUV sleeve. Even though we had tucked the sleeve inside the vestibule, and zipped everything up before leaving for a hike, a storm with strong winds blew the sleeve out the bottom of that flap. That same wind also blew the bottom edges of the vestibule inward, and caused some water to get onto the tarp we had inside. Here again, a skirt would help, especially if you can pile sand on it to keep it in place. I agree with the other reviewer about the height - it's definitely shorter than 6'5" inside, but we didn't have a problem with that since my daughter and I are average female height (5'6"). The wide arch of the tent meant that there were very few areas we had to duck. TIPS: 1. Definitely use tarps inside the vestibule and under the sleeping tent. Given the dimensions (15'2" x 10'4"), I bought two 8x10 tarps, figuring I'd have ~1-foot overlap in the middle. The tarps must be somewhat smaller than advertised, so I plan to replace one of them with a 10x12-foot tarp. The overlap was maybe 6 inches, and there was still a 1-foot-wide bare strip at the SUV end of the tent. The "almost" 10-foot width of the tarps is okay - a couple inches bigger would have been nice, but it's not enough to worry about. 2. Make sure your SUV's exhaust system has cooled before you attach the sleeve to it. (No, this wasn't a lesson learned the hard way :^) ) 3. Close your SUV's hatch during the day if you keep it attached, especially if your cooler is in it. We had direct afternoon sun on the tent, and it got hotter in the tent than in the SUV. You don't want all that ambient heat to reach the cooler. As the other reviewer said, it's easier for 2 people to put it up together, especially for centering the poles, but it's possible to do it alone. I put it up by myself when we got home, so it could dry. Bottom line - I can't wait to go camping again with this tent. I'm giving it 5 stars to bring the overall rating up to where I think it should be - at 4-1/2.

I just got this tent today, and figured I'd try the set up & take down prior to trying to do it in the woods. So, this will be part 1 of 2, the latter happening after I've tried it out in the boonies. This is NOT a 5 person tent. Unless 4 of them are under the age of 5. If you're gauging by adult size, you COULD get 4 in the inside tent, but they'd need to REALLY LIKE each other a LOT and NOT roll around in their sleep. Ever. 3 would be OK, 2 plus gear and maybe the family dog, would be optimal. It is NOT 6'6 in the inside. It's an even 6'. Which is acceptable if you're not overly tall & like to stand to get dressed in the morning. Set up is pretty basic, on par with most other dome type tents I've tried, but the pole system IS a bit different. Not bad, just different. First goes up an outer tent, which is sort of like setting up a portable gazebo. It's best to have 2 people doing this, but one can do it if they're not in a hurry. Once the outer tent is set up and staked down, it's very straight forward to put up the inner tent, which hooks into little peg & ring bits. Colour coordinate to put the red marked peg in the red marked ring, the yellow & green together. Then it's pretty straight forward to hook in the rest. Hook the back corners into their spots before hooking up the ring & pegs in the front arc. The front vestibule is quite big. If you set up in the sun, it will get HOT FAST if you don't open the windows first. It's big enough that 4 people can be inside sitting at a card table & still have room for people to get in & out of the inner tent. The sleeve that can run to an SUV is pretty straight forward. If you're not going to hook up to one, there is the option of zipping it off. I recommend doing so if you want to get the tent back into the bag, as it's a nightmare otherwise. The original carry bag is OK for JUST the tent essentials, but too small if you want to fight the sleeve in as well. A slightly larger bag would be worth Woods putting with this tent. Be sure to have the bag handy to measure against when folding, as their advice to use the pole bag, doesn't work that well. All & all, it looks fairly decent and moderately sized. A good option if you need space & don't have 5 people with you. Unless you want em to sleep in the vestibule. :D