It's a sign of our novice status that we only own one tent, but surely one is all you need? Why on earth would anyone want more than one tent? I mean you can't sleep in 2 tents at once and why would you want 2 small tents rather than one big one? It's madness to even consider more than one tent surely? Is it like bikes where you obviously need a minimum of 3 to get by*. What do you mean you don't have 3 bikes? Perhaps more than one tent is not such a mad idea.

So how do you end up owning multiple tents, well here's the story of how one multiple owner ended up with 3 tents and is looking into buying a fourth.

We bought the Cabanon Adventure (pictured right), which is a very plain and simple heavy canvas frame tent, 10-12 years ago to replace our trailer tent. We bought it because we thought it was best make. It's a 4 berth vis-a-vis design and takes up quite a lot of boot space.

We then saw the Lidl one cheap, and decided to get that for overnight stops on our way down France. Domes were pretty new at the time. Then found that we were using the Lidl one during holidays in France and using the Cabanon in UK, when we didn't mind it taking up a lot of boot space. French holidays needed all possible boot space for wine (obviously) so then we decided we really needed a slightly bigger dome but wanted to keep size down because we were still thinking of France, where you tend to get pretty small pitches.So that's why we bought the Outwell Casagrande (pictured left).

The Lidl one was fine in France where you could do cooking and eating outside, but for the UK we needed the space to sit inside which we got with the Outwell. All three of our tents are vis-a-vis, which was fine when we were only using one inner but not enough living space if you use two.

So we're now looking into getting a bigger tent (5 or 6 berth) for use in the UK, so we can live more comfortably in the tent when the weather requires it.

It's easy to see how you can slowly accumulate tents over the years and as they are not too hard to store and don't fetch much secondhand hang on to them. It's at this point that I have just realised that the title of this post is not exactly true, in that it's a complete lie. We own two tents, one of them is tucked away under the stairs I think. The kids have it out on the garden to play in occasionally. See how easy it is, even we're amassing a collection and we're not even trying.

*To clarify that's one road bike, one off-road (mountain) bike and one going to the pub/shops bike. Obviously then you can add a full suspension downhill bike, a trials bike, a TT bike, another road bike ... you get the idea :-)