Cool boxes...

[YellowDinosaur]

We have a couple of cool bags but they are a bit shit tbh and certainly no good for the 4-7 day camping trip we plan this summer.

There seems to be such a range in price for these though and I'd be interested to know what the difference is and whether it is worth paying for an expensive one.

Also the plug into the car cigarette lighter ones - do these have to be plugged in the whole time (and if so how does the battery not wear down?!?!!) or just when you are out and about?

Cheers in advance!

So I reserved a coleman xtreme one at our local go outdoors and went today to collect it. However what I hadn't appreciated was quite how HUGE it is for relatively little inside space. Bottles of wine for eg wouldn't stand up in it. So I decided to leave it and see what else I could find.

Dobby2001 what cool box do you ahve that you use with the tips you outlined? Because realistically 3-4 days is the longest we will be going camping in the next couple of years (dh refuses any longer) and so getting a coleman xtreme is probably a bit ott for us given its size and relatively small internal space

Saw this one in go outdoors coleman party stacker - they have other sizes and they all stack up which looked good (although given that we are only likely to need one its probably not a feature I need )

Has anyone used one and if so how long do they keep stuff cool for? Are they any better than the £6 one in Asda or would I be a mug?

I just use a bog standard soft cool bag that cost about £5 tbh. The Big frozen bottle of water and freezing everything that you wont be using straight away works very well for long weekends and i have yet to have anything go off. The other thing is to really think hard about how much fresh food you need to have. We often find that factoring in meals out or barbeques (where we often buy fresh from local farm shops) its often not as much as we first think - either that or we end up having very "eclectic" last morning breakfasts

Psst Lovecat - thanks for the tip, the company I'd already ordered my coolbox from has let me down* so now I've ordered from that site instead. Price is now £44.99 with free p&p, so I'm saving nearly £6 on the price I was going to pay.

• to be fair, because Coleman have let THEM down, so I'm a little concerned about my new order