The mind blowing choice of Awnings

Now that many people's initial resistance to air awnings, "what if a dog bites it, they can't be as strong as poles, I saw a couple's collapse around them" etc, have been sensibly reassigned as fiction, a sensible debate is emerging. While an electric pump might be a great fun gadget to own, hand pumping takes very few strokes in reality, and an air filled frame will give the awning its final form in significantly less time than pole sorting, joining and threading takes.

But it isn't roses all the way. Because the air beams are part of the awning, it's much heavier to lift and carry, than the poled equivilant where the weight is split between two bags. And manoeuvring that additional weight while threading a large air awning through the awning rail can be hard work for people with less strength than in their earlier years. The lack of any ability to compensate for sloping pitches by adjusting leg length can be less than ideal too. And after both types are standing on their frames comes the tedium of pegging out. Made worse in our case by a need to make cat escape proof seals around the bottom.

Perhaps the greatest time saving in erecting/ dismantling awning comes from the use of screw pegs fitted with a battery powered drill. While three clouts with a mallet will drive a rock peg home on benign ground, awkward angles and a tenacious reluctance to be extracted later on can make for an unpleasant chore when using a mallet and brute force. Screw in pegs may not save much time when setting up camp, but they make the job much easier on many types of ground, and extraction is very much easier under those circumstances too.