Floorless shelters with kids?

[Damien Tougas]

How many of you have experience using single-wall floorless shelters with kids? I am looking for a light shelter for a family of five. It seems that once you have more than four people, the number of light-weight options with floors and bug protection diminish considerably (I am aware of the GoLite Shangri-la shelters, but with full bug netting they are rather heavy). So, for those of you that do it, I have a question for you: How do you deal with condensation and bugs? Do you get bivy sacks for everyone? 5 Bivy sacks seems like it would cost a lot of money…

[Mark Verber]

The biggest challenge using a single walled shelter with my daughter was her tendency to run her sleeping bag covered legs against the roof of the shelter. Why did she do this? No clue. Anytime there was condensation the foot of her bag would end up wet. After a couple of years she grew out of that behavior and we felt free to switch her to a down bag.

As to bug protection… our solution was to camp places without bugs :-) or to use shelters that have an options of bug netting around the perimeter. For example, oware, mld, kifaru, sell tarps with bug perimeters, or you could add your own to the golite line.

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