When I first started thinking about traveling, I had to decide on where to sleep on my journey.
There are so many options out there…where to start?
First I decided that I did not want to pull anything behind my 4Runner. I decided this for a few reasons:
- I did not know anything about pulling a trailer behind my SUV. I am super comfortable driving my SUV and did not want to have another piece of equipment to slow me down.
- Hooking and unhooking a trailer was just more involved than I wanted.
The other factor to consider was the cost.
A trailer starts in the 10K range and goes up from there
A Roof Top Tent is in the 2500-3000 range depending on what features are important to you. There are RTT’s for less, but I knew I wanted a hard top just for the durability, and ease of set up and tear down every day or two.
My first RTT purchase was the Swift 1400 from Ironman 4×4. It arrived damaged on the top, and they weren’t in a hurry to fix the situation, so I ended up filing a dispute with my credit card company. I will say that their customer service is not the best, so you can choose what you do with that information. Also the tent was made in China, and if I had known that I would never of purchased it.
My second purchase was from REI, and I picked it up at the store a week after I ordered it.
After getting it to my brothers house and getting them on board to help with the installation, we could not make it work on the 4Runner.
We seriously tried all options. The first way was positioning the tent all the way to the back of the truck, which covered the antenna located there. The issue was I was not able to open my hatchback all the way. It would open only about 2/3rds of the way…totally unacceptable.
The second way we tried to position it had the front of the RTT positioned too far forward to be safe.
So even though my heart was set on having a RTT for my trip, it is not going to happen.
After returning the tent and awning to REI, the customer service rep apologized for it not working…my reply was, “I guess God did not want me to be on top”.
After I get home, and if this is a way of traveling that I think I will be doing a lot more of, I will look at a couple more RTT’s like Roofnest and Tuff Stuff. The Roofnest has a RTT called the Sparrow Eye, that looks on the smaller size.
