Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

We recently took our first family camping trip as a family of 4 with 2 young boys and a dog (4 and 7 months). I have camped and hiked a good bit, and was familiar with higher end backpacking tents, but not large family car camping tents. After doing a lot of research, and weighing spending $500 on a high end tent vs. ~$100 on big box store tents we decided to go with the Coleman Steel Creek 6. The big selling points were, price, the screen room that we can let the boys play in without getting eaten alive by bugs, and the large but not oversized tent body. I was a little cautious as I did not have a high opinion of Coleman gear. The tent goes up so easy, and with 2 people it takes less than 10 min to put up. Upon initial set up, I loved the functional layout of the tent. The tent was large enough to fit a full size air mattress, a childs sized sleeping pad, and a pack-n-play for a little one with tons of room to spare. The screen room was perfect as a play area for our boys during the day, and our dog's favorite place to sleep at night. My two concerns about the tent were the somewhat flimsy fiber glass poles, and whether or not the tent was water proof. On our final night we had an unexpected rain storm, where it came down pretty hard for about and hour. The inside of the tent was bone dry, so no worries there. Time will tell if the fiberglass poles hold up. The only down side as others have mentioned was dirt and mud did wash into the screen room. It would be so much better if Coleman used a bath tub design here as well as this was a mess in the morning. It was not horrible but it did make a mess, I will need to see what I can come up with for this.