Very sorry to report but this has been an aluminium-free summer ! We'd made great progress on the Flying Cloud in the spring with the chassis and fixing the new floor BUT my work piled in at the wrong time.
So the trusty yurt came out for the Larmer Tree music festival and for two weeks camping in deepest Cornwall in August.
Great time, great food (shore crabs, samphire & kofte kebabs...), sailing, canoeing and, of course, good old English summer weather - torrential rain.
With the odd sunny day...
I'm sure its of little interest to you alumanuts but our (homemade) yurt has done great service for the past 5 years. Its based on the traditional Mongolian yurt with a few helpful twists:
The door is much the same but has a tough, unstretchable rope of fixed (15ft) diameter attatched to it.
This rope sits on top of the lattice walls (khanas - which concertina down to 3, 2ft wide sections) and the roof poles have a slot cut in them which hooks over the rope, making it very fast to erect (20mins - yes really!). Everything is tied together with nylon cord and webbing - in Mongolia they use rawhide - which means everything is fixable with a knife, drill & more cord.
The whole structure is incredibly lightweight and strong. We then have canvas walls and roof. And over the hexagonal hole in the centre some clear, plastic stitched into canvas for those inclement summer days ! And it all fits in and on our trusty Volvo.
Hopefully the next post will be some much-needed progress on the Flying Cloud.
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