Mombasa Expedition - Car Top Tent

Lately I have been looking into the various car top tents that are available online. I am slightly obsessed with the idea of minimalistic comfortable camping equipment.

Mombasa Expedition Series:

This is the tent that seems to be very common/available on the web. Mombasa outdoors is a company that specializes in mosquito net protection. they seem to have pretty much one model of tent that has gone through various numbers of upgrades over the past few years. It is available from a number of online retailers-here are some highlights:

• Best price: http://www.trdparts4u.com/PD-RTT-9007.aspx with shipping in the 48 states <1000.00 USD
• Best pictures and descriptive website: http://www.cartopcamper.com/index.htm  this guy is really into this but charges 1135.00 USD including shipping.
• Official Mombasa website: http://www.car-top-tent.com/

This tent seems to be an entry level offering but all of the reviews give it very positive marks.

There are videos on YouTube posted by the CarTopCamper guy. the video has corny music and starts out with slides but a little ways in you get to see the operation of a Mombasa Expedition Series Tent RTT9007.

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Finished Andrea’s Desk

Last week Andrea let me spend the money we would have spent on a new desk for her office space on a new Ryobi table saw and a belt/disc sander as well as some wood to build a desk.

The problem is that if you go to a furniture store you can spend well over 250$ and end up with a particle board desk that you still have to put together. I have a dresser that my great-grandfather built that is still being used day-in-day-out. It is a family heirloom at the same time as it is practical. The real thing is just so much better than something from an assembly line.

	Particle Board Desk	Handmade Desk
Desk Materials	250.00 (kit made by Sauder)	70.00 (Home Depot)
Tools	0	230.00
Effort to Construct	1-1.5 hours	10 hours
Intrinsic value	Goodwill Fodder	Priceless
Actual Value	Goodwill Fodder	300.00-350.00

I spent a little over a hundred per tool and then 70$ on the wood. Nice thing is is we have the tools now for future projects.

Andrea had never experienced the hobby called wood-burning. I grew up doing it. We decided to dig my old wood-burning iron out of the toolbox and use it to add some interesting embellishments to the desk. I got started doing the wood-burning but she took over and ended up doing most of it. She is quite good at it.

I have not done a lot of woodworking for about a decade but the skills do come back. I am hoping to build many other things in the future. I’d like to build a Teardrop camper and some bunk beds for our kids.

Here you can see the finished product. We are pretty proud of it, we finished it up just in time for the 7-year anniversary of the day I asked Andrea out, which incidentally is our 6.5 year wedding anniversary.

In this first photo you can see the desk finished with her computer setup on it and everything. We are going to setup a cork board on the wall behind it for her to organize coupons notes etc.

Asher 4 Months