Gadling Gear Lust: Field Candy Tents

Our battered Coleman tent has been through years of service and cost something like $80 at an end-of-season sale at the local Target. It’s a workhorse and held up on gravel and snow and kept the campers inside it dry in pelting rain, letting in nothing more than a little damp on the corners and collecting a little condensation on the liner. But for all its practicality, there is one thing it is not: pretty. It is an olive green and tan little dome that looks like every other olive green and tan or red and tan or blue and tan little dome lined up on the grass in the tent meadow at any campground.

Enter the Field Candy tent. I can’t speak to the efficacy of these gorgeous little temporary shelters, but I also can’t decide which one I want the most. The one with the cow on it? The one that looks like a battered old suitcase? Yeah. That one. No, wait. I like the one that looks like a slice of watermelon because to see that when you pull up in your Subaru full of camping gear would crack you right up.

The Field Candy tent has all the stuff you’d expect from a decent camping tent – shock corded poles, a waterproof fly, and the easy clip up assembly. As a camper in wet climates, I’m suspicious of the cotton inner tent because it seems like something that would take a while to dry should it get wet. It’s got the bucket style ground sheet – you have to have that! – and a bunch of other features that look well thought out. This is no $80 clearance Coleman, some of them are over $700, so I’d expect performance as well as style.

But on the surface, it’s all about appearances. I want one. Maybe the one that looks like a circus tent. Or, no. The sandwich. Yeah, that one. No. Wait…

Outer Space Camping Tent

I want a tent that looks like outer space – an outer space camping tent. Luckily, Field Candy has designed such a tent. A high performance A-frame camping tent with a digitally printed outer space shell looks every bit as good as it sounds. I haven’t tried it out myself yet and I probably never will because it is $649.99 and I thereby have no claim to how good of a tent this product actually is, but something tells me that the simple act of taking this tent along for a camping or backpacking trip would win you countless conversations with fellow traversing strangers, for better or for worse. And really, that’s what traveling is all about, the for-better-or-for-worse part. So set up an Amazon gift registry that includes this tent and hope that friends will come across it online and buy it for you.