I’m 5 foot 10 and found that I had space to sleep in any direction within the Tentbox Lite XL. It’s 180cm by 240cm so anyone under 6 foot will have that same benefit. It handily means you don’t have to be careful with how you orientate your car if you’re pitching on a slope – or you don’t have to sleep with your legs pointed uphill and your head downhill!

I also liked the climate that the design creates inside. The canvas material keeps out both the early morning light and heat, so I found I could comfortably lie in a lot longer than I’d expected and would normally be able to in a standard tent. I also found that it felt much drier inside it; I never got that clammy feeling you can often get in a ground tent. This is obviously down to the fact, first of all, that you’re not on the wet ground but also I think the number of ventilation points makes a big difference too.

One aspect that was super nice to have was the ability to open up the top ‘skylights’ to get a view of the stars at night. We found ourselves going to sleep with the skylights open and closing them up early in the morning before the sun came up. Fortunately, the smooth zips and large zip pulls that are easy to locate in the dark made this pretty effortless.

Drawbacks

I did find there were some drawbacks though. On our first night in the Calais area, the campsite we had aimed for was closed by the time we got there. We considered just camping in a lay-by down a quiet lane but the Tentbox just didn’t feel inconspicuous enough to do this. With a van, we would’ve been fine because we would’ve felt more subtle and actually more secure too. I found myself wishing we’d brought a separate two-person tent as with that we could at least venture off the road to sleep in nearby sand dunes, out of sight and out of the way. In the end, we fortunately managed to solve the problem by finding an aire de camping – basically a municipal roadside carpark specifically for van campers.

The second problem we encountered was also on that first night. Our aire was located on top of a cliff and was exposed to the windy coastline of northern France. That night, we didn’t sleep too well as the tent – and the car – wobbled in the fairly strong winds. The Dacia Duster we’d borrowed for the trip is quite high and therefore the top of the Tentbox was about 3-metres off the ground, so that’s just something to bear in mind. I imagine that the higher your car is, the more wobble you’re going to get.