Motorcycle camping. The best camping gear to take on a motorcycle tour

hi welcome to motorcycle tours to Spain top tips camping gear today we're going to talk about camping gear and that's likely to open up a whole can of worms there's literally thousands of options so I'll show you what I use and I'll hope I can sensibly justify why I've chosen to use what I have chosen to use and why over the years I've ended up with this kind of stuff the first one's the tent I go with a three-man tent I like the room people can travel with the one man if that's what you want to do not a problem two man no problem I like three some of the tours we do we have base camps so we'll go into the the Picos de Europa we'll set up camp and we'll stay there for two or three nights that means I've got a nice big tent I can put all my boxes in and I can ride the rest of the twisties without any luggage but even when I'm not doing that if I'm going from A to B to C I still like that space in there to spread out its comfy so three man that's top of my list the next thing is the waterproofing of the tent and that's measured in something called hydrostatic head without getting too complicated they have a column of water and they attach some fabric to the bottom of the column and see how much water they can get in the column so a hydrostatic head of a thousand has one meter of water pressure down this tube before it starts leaking through the fabric I always choose a 5 000 hydrostatic head which means the column of water on this fabric is five meters high so it's about as waterproof as you can get without the spending silly money on it the next is a style I'm not a big fan of tunnel tents now tunnel tents generally a little bit lighter because they only have two poles and you you've got to stretch out your guidelines and Peg them in and that can be a problem in Spain the ground in Spain and Portugal can be so hard that you're not going to get a tent peg in I like the Dome or the semi geodesic tent or the fully geodesic tent and all that means is how many times the poles cross on this particular tent there's three poles and they cross three times once there once they're once on the top that makes for really rigid tent a stable tent and that has its advantages one of them is you can pick your tent up so you can put the poles in it and then you can move it round and find the most suitable spot for it and that suitable stop could be the way the land is you want your bed nice and level it could be to get the best view or it could be to position your tent so the prevailing wind is hitting the back of your tent and that means if it does rain you get any drizzle in the night it's coming this way so that would be my recommendation the next thing is we've got to get down we've got to talk about 10 pegs that ground can be so hard that these normal lightweight aluminum pegs they're not going to work very well now I don't actually need many tent pegs with this particular model at all but what I do carry is some tried and trusted six-inch nails and even they're bent I've had these a long time so with this particular model all I've got to do is Peg out the front two and if I can't get a peg in the ground I could use a guy line on a rock or a brick or something like that with these six inch nails I can normally get them in somewhere so once my poles are in that's my tent set up that's all I've got to do it is quite quick as well actually if the ground is good I will probably put some more pegs out just to just to keep that a little bit more secure but I don't have to that's the beauty of the the style of tent that I've got here let me just get some stuff to put it inside foreign a tent is in what order do you pitch it there's basically three ways one way is you put the inner up first and then you put your outer over the top and it doesn't make much sense to me if you're unlucky enough to get caught in the rain and you're in it gets wet while you're putting your tent up you then put your outer over the top and you've got a wet tent that doesn't make any sense to me the other way is the complete reverse of that where you have to pitch your outer first and then you hang you in a tent after you're out as erected well aren't you pitching too tense when you do that I don't like that idea either so what I go for is pitch to get an attempt and that inner stays hooked up the whole time uh it's great so if it's raining it it doesn't really matter and when I finished it all goes down together put it in the pannier and off I go right let me get some stuff in there Camp bed I did use this a few times until I realized it was a complete waste of time not very expensive I think I paid 20 quid for that about five years ago about 24 25 quid now but the weight of that is just silly I don't take it to Camp bed anymore I don't need it what I used to travel with a self-inflating mattress sounds good doesn't it self-inflating that's really easy let me just show you how it works this isn't a bad make actually it's a van Gogh so what we've got in here is foam inside an airtight bag now what's happened is that the foam started to expand while it's in the back ah you can see why I gave up on this I still see a lot of people using and I used to think that they were the solution to a good night's sleep I know right foreign ly so we've got foam in here and the foam is always trying to expand and the general idea is it can't expand because no air can get in then you undo the valve and leave the bed and over five ten minutes it'll start inflating I don't know if the camera can pick that up but as that foam sucking air in that's slowly unrolling the problem with this is that I found is even if you leave it for half an hour and do the valve up you're only sleeping on foam there's no air in there so to get it a little bit firmer and a bit more comfortable you've got a blow in it now you're blowing damp air inside your mattress and I don't know what the state of the inside of that is going to be like it's just too bulky and in actual fact they're not that comfortable I don't think they take up a lot of space on the bike they're a pain to get out the bag and then if we want to get this small again it's quite tricky there's quite a technique too um rolling all the air out of this foam as you go along you've got to keep it really tight and this is a pain this takes a while in the morning the last thing I want to do is faff around unnecessarily with kit give up on that I'll show you what I use I've had enough of that here we go this is what I wanted my ex bed I bought this by accident and I went away last year with a couple of bikers that wanted to have a base house so we rented the whole house but a couple of nights I was camping so rather than take all the big kit with me uh for two nights I invested in this little thing and it's turned out to be one of the best buys I've ever made I mean looking at it you think no way can that be as comfortable as that big mattress was looking at a minute ago but it really is it wasn't cheap it was 80 quid and it's basically a glorified Lilo some of those glorified lilos out there can be 300 quid so I know 80 sounds a lot of money but in comparison it wasn't that bad I'll show you how it works first of all the beauty of it is it weighs next to nothing and it falls down really small then you unroll it just here there was a little built-in hand pump we undo the valve and there's a picture there for your hand and you just sit here maybe with a tin of beer on the go and after a few minutes she's done so while I pump that up I'll talk about cookers cookers that's another thing where you're going to get a thousand opinions on you've also got the gas and gas canisters come in different sizes and I've traveled with gas canisters for years and years and years but I've just recently changed and there was a good reason for that I was on a tour around Spain who's the devil's breath tour actually and I ran out of gas and it was a bit of a struggle finding gas so if the Art's not gonna happen to me again what I'm going to do is I'm going to invest in the Coleman's multi-fuel stove now these aren't the Sheep they're about 130 quid if you're just going away for a few nights or you're only going to make coffee in the morning then one of those full will last you three weeks not a problem obviously it depends how much you use it if you're just making coffee one of those is going to be all right the reason I went with the Coleman's is because it takes petrol and I can always get petrol either out the bike or from a garage and there's loads of garages that sell petrol there's not always a camping shop that sells gas so this is my breakfast setup my stove one liter Kettle water from the campsite and packets of coffee they do loads of different flavors of these and they do vanilla and caramel and these are my favorite my little sweetness that's it lightweight cup I can always have a cup of tea and I think that bed's pumped up already that didn't take long did it let's get that sorted we need to come inside the tent now guys that's my sleeping Arrangement all set up I've got my sleeping bag my three season sleeping bag there it's classed as a mummy but you wouldn't really know unless you looked at it closely it's a wide mummy sleeping bag the advantage of a mummy sleeping bag of course they pack smaller but the disadvantage is they can be restrictive so I find the wide mummy uh a good compromise really nice bag that is actually I've used it ever such a lot that white there that's a sleeping bag liner I always travel with a sleeping bag liner um it's not a heat issue it's a kindness issue and that's so easy so lightweight so easy to to wash you can rinse out hang up in the morning and come back in the evening and that's dry and then you've got a nice clean fresh liner to sleep in the pillows here if you've seen the packing video I've done you know I take two pillows I've got my blow up pillow underneath Which packs down really small and my fluffy pillow on top it's one of the things I like about the mummy style is they've got this Hood which your pillow can tuck into and you need to get a really nice fluffy floofy good night's sleep on that here's the air bed blown up that is surprisingly comfortable I got that actually from go Outdoors so what you could always do is go to go Outdoors pump one up and uh lie on it for five minutes in the shop they won't mind tell them I said it was okay you'd be cool three-man tent yeah I wouldn't really want to get three men in there actually but they do class it's a three-man tent there's room at the back end for my luggage my biking gear biking boots outside Under The Canopy here uh this is where I make coffee in the morning um yeah I'm pleased with this setup it's probably over the years it's the best setup and the best kit I've I've had but I've been I've been tweaking it all the time of course oh yes look what I've just found found my old camping store I bought that at decathlon near Malaga about 10 years ago really comfy stool I like it sturdy but it's too big and it's too heavy but that was my choice of seats for many years of course if you've got hard luggage you've always got your panniers to sit on and your top box as a table for a game of cards but I was traveling game or two ago and one of the lads gave me this now I don't know where he got it unfortunately but you see how lightweight and small it is and that actually is a little stool foreign look at that that is brilliant so now that if I do take a stool is what I carry with me if I don't want to sit on top of a pannier excellent I wish I knew where we got it it really is a lovely piece of Kit actually and that just folds away goes back in there if you found anything about this video useful or of Interest please give us a thumbs up and I'll know you appreciate it and that'll inspire me to do some more thanks for watching foreign

Channel: Motorcycle Tours to Spain

Views: 9,215

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Id: Vb58zyFOtUQ

Length: 14min 25sec (865 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 11 2023