If you were to like what you see and go in search of all of it - you won't find it. On the last day of our trip the newest Magellan Ponderosa set up next to us and it sent me to Academy to see what was up in tent land.
Y'all the new tents are NICE.
There's a Grand Ponderosa now, it seems to take up the same amount of tent pad space as ours, but is a touch taller.
The tent pads at Greenbriar are fairly large, there have been many times that our tent was staked off the tent pad. Also for reference, I think this is site 101 at Greenbriar. If you are camping there definitely hit up 100 or 101 if you want to camp in the middle of the RV area.
I personally prefer it because there is less brush and the kids are less likely to encounter poison ivy or snakes. They also have tent sites on the other side of the river that feel much more removed from everyone else and have a ton more shade.
But like I said, 100-101 are the best as far as shade and trees go. If you're new to tent camping the trees come in handy for all manner of things.
So first up in camping additions - I bought a 5x7 outdoor rug for in front of the tent. This (as I suspected) helped a ton with keeping the kids from dragging in so much dirt. I don't think I even swept the tent out before we rolled it up this year. I swept mid week, but it was nothing compared to camping in the past.
This was all taken after we had a very long thunderstorm. You can see what the ladies in the 100 spot did to cover their tent. Jeremy always stakes a tarp to the top to help with the heat as well as any rain.
While the ground at Greenbriar doesn't let the water sit and leave puddles everywhere... the inside of the tent told a different story. You can take several hours of rain in a tent and stay dry, but after well over 12 hours of thunderstorms we were finding that anything touching an exterior wall was problematic.
The air mattresses had been pushed to each wall and two pockets in the tent were full of stuff - each of those pressure points caused leaks. Luckily that was nothing the box fan couldn't dry up the next day. It would take a ton of standing water, basically a flood, before water came in the bottom of the tent. It's just that windbreaker material sides that doesn't like storms.
Also - that's the AC setup again from the outside.
During the first storm my paper towels didn't even get wet - the over night storm was another story!
I always place out popup over the table and leave out coffee maker out. The paper towels were secured to the bars of pop-up with a small bungee cord. This was the first time I tried that trick and I will be sticking with it in the future.
We also added outdoor lights this year around the eating area and where we generally have our camping chairs.
Granted - I didn't remember to take photos until after the storm. But you can see that I keep the ice chest on one side of the table and my kitchen bucket on the other. Towels will hang from the pop-up tent or (if we have more trees) we will hang a line and put the trees there.
You can see at the back of the photo that we replaced our long gone hammock!
Just another angle of the campsite set up. At Greenbriar you can park you car in front of the site long enough to unpack, but parking is behind the tent sites.
Elliot is currently looking at this blog post and telling me that he wants to go sleep in the tent again. The kids really adore camping trips.
