Quechua Base

These past two years, when we attended kite festivals, we usually brought our wee 2-person tent with us in which to keep our kite bags. It served that purpose fine, but no more than that. The tent is too small to sit in, change clothes in, take shelter in when it rains, or basically, do anything else than simply serve as a place to store our kite bags.

So it was time to look for something a bit more fit-for-purpose. Several of the kite teams (for instance, Team Flame and The Flying Squad) come to kite festivals with Quechua tents, which have plenty of space for kite and other bags, but also offer space to sit in, move around in, and allow you to take stuff from a bag without having to drag the bag from the tent first. Also, they pop up and fold up again in very little time.

Bit of googling, and the decision fell on a Quechua Base Seconds. They come stored as a 'wheel':

And then literally explode into a very nice base tent!

It really takes a few minutes to set the tent up, but collapsing it for the first time took a bit longer ... I thought I'd watch carefully how the tent unfolded, so I'd know how to fold it back up again, but the unfolding went so fast that we had to resort to watching a video on the Quechua web-site to see how to fold it up properly again. It'll take a few more attempts to do it within the stated 2 minutes, but I'm sure we'll get the hang of it in due course.

First time our Quechua will see action is probably Portsmouth Kite Festival; it'll be right next to our pole with flying fish!