Getting Away with the Subaru XV
I grew up with camping, first camping in standard tents, moving onto trailer tents and then finally onto a Caravan, I loved camping and the way it makes you get outside and enjoy the fresh air.
In a world where (in our house at least) the Xbox dominates the summer holidays, I’m always conscious that my boys don’t do enough things outside these days.
We therefore jumped at the chance to take the Subaru XV for an adventure weekend camping!
The car itself was quite large and roomy, but not too big that it felt like I was driving a tank (and then searching for the biggest car parking space available!). It was easy to handle and a nice smooth ride with the added benefits of in-car Satellite Navigation and climate control.
We kicked off our time with Subaru at an off-roading day, where we were shown how to handle the car in sticky situations, it was great fun and the boys had a blast!
I had to then go out and buy all (I mean absolutely everything) to enable us to go camping! This took a few trips and lots of advice searching on the likes of Twitter for peoples recommendations on tents.
I was conscious that If i didn’t get a tent that was easy to assemble and dissemble then it could potentially put me and the boys off camping for some time. So we ended up splashing out on the Kampa Southwold 4+2 Air Tent. Here’s a short video of us putting this tent up, I’ve sped the video up, but it took around 6-8 mins to peg out and inflate (sorry for the crazy filming towards the end, I knew I should have left the camera on the car!)…
I decided not to venture too far from home for our first camping trip so was recommended a fantastic campsite on the edge of the Peak District – Middlehills Farm.
The site had an on-site shop, playground, 3 large fields to choose from and 4 resident pigs who were the most friendliest pigs I’ve ever met, they rush up to see you for a scratch on the back…very sweet 🙂
You can also hire fire pits so you can keep warm in the evenings, toast marshmallows or make the best toast ever!
The campsite even had a climbing wall on the first day we were there, of course they wanted to try this out!
Due to the very unpredictable UK weather, we had some rainy times. Fortunately the tent was big enough to comfortable sit all of us around a table, have the cooking stove and more, so even though it was rainy we weren’t crawling over each other.
The eldest even took to making everyones toast in the mornings 🙂
Even when it was rainy, we had a back up plan…playing Pass the Pigs! The game from my own camping childhood!
Although, not sure I’m liking these scores too much!
All in all we had a great weekend camping and the boys wanted to stay an extra night and now we have all the kit, we can go again and again!
In the next few posts, I will go into more detail on what other adventures we got up to on our #xvadventure camping weekend.
Where are good campsites that you would recommend?
13 Comments
fashion-mommy
This looks like great fun, although I still can’t get my head around camping. We have a static caravan on a caravan site in Wales and that has a pretty good camping field attached to the site.
Emx
#UKBloggers
Carly
Thanks for stopping by Em, I felt the same with camping, but I made sure we had a big enough tent that we could comfortable sit inside, stand up etc..I also made sure we had a comfy blow up bed!
Alastair McKenzie
North Morte Farm on the north coast of Devon is pretty spectacular (on the horizon on these photos, that’s Wales!) and 5 mins walk from the village pub 🙂
https://plus.google.com/117525932890821030660/about?hl=en
Carly
Hi Alastair, wow this does look nice! Will have to add it to my list 🙂
Merlinda Little (@pixiedusk)
We are new campers! Still on our tent phase and I dont think we will ever do the caravan as we dont have budget for that. We enjoy doing camping so much as evident to a lot of my post in the past weeks. We are going again this week and its exciting as it said its going to rain which is going to be challenging as we dont have stove like yours. Hopefully we will survive it =P #letkidsbekids
Sim @ Sims Life
Looks like you all had a fantastic time and I am so glad you enjoyed your stay at the site. Middlehills is awesome – good timing with the climbing wall being there.
The Subaru looks great, you certainly managed to fit a lot in there!!xx
Carly
Hey Sim, thanks to you for the recommendation, I’ll definitely look to go back there as it’s not too far a drive away!
Lindsey Kettle
It looks like you had a fab time 🙂 Ironically about an hour ago my hubby showed me one of these tents online and how easy they are to put up, then I clicked on your post to read and there it was – begin recommended by a blogger!!x #PoCoLo
Carly
hi Lindsey, thanks for stopping by, yes I would definitely recommend the air tent, when I look at all the other tents with poles I just don’t know where to start and the thought of doing on my own would have sent me over! Definitely worth the investment as I know we’re all keen to go camping again.
Karen Bell
That looks like a fantastic camping adventure. The tent looks fab, we have been thinking about getting a tent like that. Camping is such a great thing to do with kids.
Thanks for linking #LetKidsBeKids
WildFamilyFun
Hi, how did you find the air tents? I have seen them alot and we camp so often, just wondered if they were strong in the frame of the tent.
We camp at Porth Clais in St Davids alot and then Brecon when its Duke of Edinburgh session, we love camping as a family. My daughter is never happy when shes snuggled in her sleeping bag and listening to the wind outside our tent.
Carly
Hi, I found the frame really sturdy, the air pipes are quite thick and really solid when inflated. We went when that hurricane was causing lots of wind and rain here and it stood up really well to that! They’re meant to be able to withstand 75mph wind apparently.
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