Back in 2008 finding himself unexpectedly separated, living with his 10-year-old daughter with his younger son moving in later, it wasn’t a difficult decision for Craig to devote all available holiday time to the pursuit of character-building experiences for his children.
Following the loss of the former family motorhome, Craig downsized to a Renault traffic van to carry the fun stuff and fitted a Hannibal Roof tent and awning to provide the required accommodation. The “Adventure Van” was the base for off-road motorcycling, on-road motorcycling, canoeing, cycling, hiking, paragliding, and sky dives as well as the usual camping and holiday sight-seeing activities. This tented van was just the beginning of a new way of holidaying that provided the means to undertake affordable adventures and activities that would never have come to pass otherwise.
Eventually the ‘Adventure Van’ gave way to an older American RV with a blown turbo that once repaired became the families new adventure base camp. Together with the daughters of Craig’s new partner, a new passion for Winter holidays and snowboarding evolved. Learning a new and exhilarating sport, whilst meeting the challenges of Winter camping was how character-building experiences continued year-round.
Inevitably as the children grew up their need to do their own thing meant that the RV could give way to something smaller, much smaller in fact. Leading to a return of a former passion for Land Rovers and camping in wilder places. Even in Winter during the pursuit of fresh powder off-piste snowboarding fun, Fondue & Picon-Bière, all the previous RV camping experiences coming together to afford the most amazing yet warm Roof Top Tent camping experiences imaginable.
The many iterations of heating and roof tent trials and errors finally leading to the creation of the Hotbox camping heater and an innovative new Roof top and Swing-Away tent product line.
As testament to the success of a childhood filled with character-building experience’s Jack, who can be seen in many of the accompanying photos played an enormous part in the development of the products that you’ll find on this website. Jack at 19 and just reaching the end of a longer than expected Engineering Apprenticeship is responsible not only for producing the technical drawings and building prototypes but also coming up with many of the ideas and solutions to problems encountered during product development.
When Jack and his old man are not working together then you may find them (but you’ll have to look hard) often with Jessica in some remote spot camping, joking, putting the world to rights, and generally enjoying life in the countryside, bush-crafting, mountain biking, hiking, snowboarding etc whenever and wherever they can.
