Look! Up in the campground! It's a car! It's a tent! It's a Prius Super RV! Faster than a rubber bullet! More powerful than a toy locomotive! Able to leap tall rumble strips in a single bounce!....... The Napier "Sportz Dome-to-Go" Model 86000 tent is 8.5 feet x 8.5 feet at the base with about 7 foot headroom, which was plenty for the two chairs and folding table we used it for: We slept on a custom-cut mat of foam plus air mattresses in the rear of the Prius. The front seats are moved all the way forward and the front of the foam mat rest on stacks of two plastic milk crates placed in the foot wells of the back seat. The topmost milk crate on each side has a wood insert fashioned to fit flush with the rim. When packed and ready to drive, the front seats are moved backward and the back seat area looks like this: (Clockwise from upper left: folding table, pole bag and tent bag, two folding chairs, air mattress, and sleeping bag.) While driving, the plastic milk crates all nestle together in the trunk area: With this setup, we have adequate protection against bears if we sleep with the hatch down, and room to dress, eat, and relax inside during inclement weather. Just make sure the exhaust pipe vents directly to the outdoors and NOT into the tent area!! But we achieved an indicated 62 mpg driving in the Blue Ridge Mountains and Shenandoah Valley. Cheeers!
We ate canned food (good), soup with noodles in those foam cups (ok), idahoan dried potato buds (surprisingly tasty), and backpacker style freeze dried meals from Wal Mart (egg and bacon was acceptable, but my hashed brown and mystery meat meal was poor). I would recommend all but the backpacker freeze dried meals. (Need to try other brands, tho). No hunting allowed in the National Park, so no Bambi meals, but upside was that the deer were so tame that we could walk up to within 10 feet of them before they would amble away. Nice pics that way. This is a really efficient low environmental impact way to go camping.
Two straps from the tent seam right over the hatchback go all the way forward and must be hooked on something metal. The instructions recommended the hinges for the hood, so that is what we used. They are just small plastic hooks, but the straps prevent the tent from blowing backwards off the hatch if you get strong winds from the front so it seemed better to have them fastened down. However, I probably could have completely closed the hood as the hooks are quite small; I just did not want to take a chance on breaking anything .
Robert, ( and others)do you have any experience with the tent in HIGH winds ? I camp in SO-CAL and AZ and the winters/spring can get 40-60 gusts quite often. KinA
The hatchback supports on side of the roof of the dome, which helps stabilize it a lot. The gusts would make the tall sides of the dome billow in and out, but we never felt like there was any chance of it tipping over as long as we staked the corners with decent sized stakes. I would carry stakes for any type of terrain including sandy soil, clay soil, or the woods. I would avoid camping on bare rock shelves without any possibility of staking or tying to nearby trees. Have fun, folks!
