Earlier this month the second anniversary of the CheapTents.com Outdoor Gear Blog passed by uneventfully. Yet on the 7th of August 2009, the first anniversary was celebrated with a summary of our favourite outdoor blog posts. So it seems only fitting that we should do a round up of the best posts of our second year before this month is over.
Best Outdoor Gear Posts
One of our favourite bits of outdoor gear this year is the Vango Helium Superlite tent. Available in two models, the 1 man 100 model and the 2 man 200 tent, both are lightweight, rugged and ideally suited for mountain marathons or solo walking. Our review looks at the Vango tents in detail.
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Finding the best apps around is never easy, especially given the nature of Android being open source which means anyone can create an app and send it into the wild. So to help ease the burden of finding the best mapping apps around we at cheap tents have come up with our top 4 Android Apps for you to download and play with. Either search them in the market place or scan the barcode.
Let us know what you think of these apps, or suggest some other apps
Before we start, don’t forget Google Maps on the Android is also an amazing app and is really quite powerful.
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In the future, due to shortages of land and restrictions in transport, food could be grown in skyscrapers. Often referred to as vertical farms, these buildings could become a prominent feature of the urban environment. For many city dwelling people, these vertical farms will offer the opportunity to go hiking. However, skyscrapers are not the only type of structure which can be used for growing vegetation.
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Fill That Hole! A mini-garden in the street. Source: Flickr by ©thepotholegardener
Following the cold snap at the beginning of the year, our roads were left full of potholes, causing a nightmare for cyclists and drivers alike. Fortunately help was at hand, the
Fill That Hole website being just the ticket for reporting potholes to your local highways agency. Using Google maps the exact location of the pothole can be pinpointed and reported. Fairplay to my local highway authority who have patched up a lot of potholes since the big freeze. Not everyone has been so lucky, however. The roads in East London have not had their potholes filled in a timely fashion, leading to a spate of gardening in the streets. In a protest over the lack of remedial road care by his local authority, the mysterious
pothole gardener has taken action. Sporting a safety vest and armed with a trowel, some soil and flowers, he has taken to the streets and literally filled that hole!
 Before...a pothole |
 After...a mini garden |
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It is fast becoming apparent that unless we want to exhaust all the resources on our shared planet, sustainability is the way forward. With an emphasis on re-use and recycling we thought it would be fun to come up with some ideas for re-using old camping equipment. Here are some ideas that we had…
Tent Flysheet or Groundsheet protector
- sail for a sailing boat
- curtains
Tent Poles
- wind chimes
Tent pegs
- cooking / kebab skewers
Tent mesh inner
- bee keeping hat
- light boxes for photography
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Berghaus have launched an online rock climbing flash game to give the general public a virtual taste of a major climbing adventure.
For most of the year the fjords on Baffin Island are filled with frozen sea ice, but for a short period in the summer the ice melts and with 24 hours of daylight the area becomes a climbers paradise with mile high granite walls and amazing scenery.
Last year, sponsored climbers Leo Houlding and Carlos Suarez tackled the Asgard Project, an ambitious expedition to climb the mile high Mount Asgard (named after the realm of the Norsk gods) on Baffin Island in the Arctic Circle, and then BASE jump from the top.
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During a recent conversation about dystopian novels, the George Orwell classic 1984 was inevitably mentioned. In the novel, Big Brother wants to reduce number of words in the language in order to control people, for example, to stop people having ideas about ousting the authorities. This led us to thinking about how useful a minimal language might be. Due to our interest in adventure and world travel, we thought that it would be beneficial if everyone on the planet could learn a world language containing a minimal number of words, i.e. an essential vocabulary. That way speaking abroad would be easier. Wherever you travel you can also be assured that people can help you with your basic needs. Conversely, you can always help or assist a foreigner who is visiting or travelling through your country. A widely spoken second language is sometimes referred to as an auxiliary language.
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Have you ever been climbing, mountain biking, kayaking, skateboarding and found a great new place for some exciting action? Perhaps you’ve found a place that’s not the best but its close to home and offers the opportunity to get a bit of practice in, just to help keep your skills up to speed? Or maybe you’re going somewhere new and looking for the best place for some extreme sport action? If you want to share your favourite places or find something new then one place to look is Extreme Sports Map!
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Google is constantly seeking new information which it likes to share with the online world. One of the best examples of this is mapping. Satellite images are available for all to see on Google Earth. Google Maps not only features maps and aerial views, but for many parts of the world we can see what it looks like at street level with Google Street View. An immeasurable number of miles of roads in western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Japan and the USA have been photographed at road level. This is done using cars with 360 degree cameras mounted on the roof. The Google cars simply drive around filming our roads and streets.
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Just a quick post from all of us at CheapTents.com to say Happy Christmas!
We hope you all got lots of nice shiny new outdoor gear from Santa. Whilst you are enjoying your Christmas dinner and longing to get out into the countryside, spare a thought for poor Santa. Christmas is not plain sailing for Father Christmas, Rudolf and the team, having to deliver all your lovely pressies. After all, climbing down and back up millions of chimneys in one night can takes it out of you. The You Tube video below shows Santa doing a bit of training, abseiling down the aptly named Chimney Rock. Located at Chimney Rock State Park, North Carolina in the United States, Chimney rock is a little way from Santa’s Lapland home, but even when he is on holiday Father Christmas must keep up with his training!
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