The first drip hit Maya's forehead at 2:40 in the morning. By 3:15 there was a puddle in the low corner of the tent the size of a dinner plate, Nico's sleeping bag was soaking it up like a sponge, and Dana and I were sitting up in the dark with a headlamp and a beach towel, pretending this was fine. It was Veterans Day weekend at Flamingo. The rain didn't stop until sunrise, and our first tent was finished.
What went wrong with the old one
That tent was a Coleman Sundome, six-person, $99 in December 2023. To be fair to it, it did what a $99 tent can do. It got us through four trips: a chilly MLK weekend at Long Pine Key, a spring break at Jonathan Dickinson, a Memorial Day weekend at Fort De Soto we'd rather forget, and then Flamingo. It's a fine tent for dry weather and light rain.
Flamingo was not light rain. The Sundome's fly covers the top of the tent and not much more, and that night the wind pushed rain under the fly and against the side walls. Water wicked in along the floor seams and pooled in the low corner. I own part of this. I never seam-sealed it, and I pitched it in a slight dip because that spot was closest to the picnic table. Nothing was ruined except a sleeping bag that took two days to dry and one page of Maya's nature journal that's still wavy. But on the drive home, Dana said, very calmly, "We need a real tent before we do this again."
The Sundome now belongs to a coach friend who wanted something for backyard campouts with his kids. I told him about the corner. He said his backyard has an excellent emergency exit called the back door.
What we wanted in the replacement
We made the list at the kitchen table. Maya wrote it down, in two colors.
- A full-coverage rain fly that comes most of the way to the ground on every side. This was the whole point.
- Room for four people and the bags. Tent ratings are optimistic. A six-person tent fits four of us the way a car fits four people and a cooler. We shopped eight-person tents.
- Two doors, so a five-year-old who needs the bathroom at 2 a.m. doesn't crawl over three people to get out.
- A vestibule for shoes, so Nico's shoes have a place to be before he loses one of them.
- A setup two adults can do in about 15 minutes, before the kids get bored and start helping.
- Under $250.
We read a lot of reviews, but seeing a few tents set up in a store helped more. Standing inside a tent tells you things a photo doesn't, like whether I can change a shirt without folding in half. We came home with a green-and-tan eight-person dome tent with a full fly, two doors and a decent vestibule: $219 on Saturday, January 11. The day before, we'd bought our first America the Beautiful pass for $80, for the national parks on this year's list, so it was an expensive weekend. Both receipts went straight into the trip log.
The backyard test
I didn't want to learn about this tent at 3 a.m., 45 miles from home, so it went up in the backyard that afternoon, on the grass between the old mango tree and the fire pit.
The first setup took 24 minutes, with the instructions open and Nico handing me stakes I hadn't asked for. We took it down and did it again in 12. That second number is the one that matters.
Then came the part the kids liked best. Maya and Nico zipped themselves inside with flashlights as official inspectors, and I sprayed the fly with the garden hose for ten minutes, sweeping it along the walls and aiming low and sideways like wind-driven rain. From inside it's a steady drumming that Nico described as "being in a drum, but a nice one." They found one drip, at the bottom of the front door, where I hadn't fastened the flap on the fly. I fixed it, tried again, nothing.
We also let the tent dry completely in the sun before packing it, right down to the stake bag. The Sundome went into storage damp more than once, and I could still smell it when I folded it up for my friend.
Nico and I slept in the new tent that night, in the backyard, at about 60 degrees, which in Miami counts as an event. Pickles watched us from the bedroom window with what I'd call concern. The tent was quiet, dry and roomy. The only problem was that a five-year-old with that much floor space sleeps in a full circle, and by morning his feet were on my pillow.
Long Pine Key is this weekend, with a cold front coming through Friday. The new tent gets its first real night, and I've promised Dana I'll look for dips before I look for the picnic table.
