Planning an Amazon micro adventure

For some time now I have been wanting to delve into the world of micro adventures, that is, wild camping trips that usually take 24hrs or so that can be done over the weekends/days off. What took me by surprise was just how popular this hobby is, I thought I had just come up with it while sitting in a tent a while back!

Typing in tents or camping into ebay or amazon and you get hit with tens of thousands of products, no doubt mostly inadequate for this purpose. So the question arose, where do I start? I grew up living for summer camping trips as a kid so I thought I had it sussed, get a tent, nice sleeping bag and away I will go. How wrong was I!? Having spent the best part of this week frantically researching backpacking tents and sleeping bags and figuring out what brands are worth looking at, I now know I know nothing. So I decided to make this a challenge, I would be flat out broke if I just went and bought what I thought I needed and would end up having to live in my £800 Hilleberg tent eating from an empty tin of cold beans. 

So now my Edmund Hillary self embodied image is shattered, time to get rational. Essential objectives are;

• find nice places to camp to take awesome photographs
• have a decent form of shelter that wont collapse at the first breath of Hebridean fury
• source a backpack that will accommodate all of my required equipment
• a sleeping bag that is warm enough but not too heavy
• avoid carrying utterly useless gear i.e. Rambo knife, 4 burner gas stove etc... in other words keep the pack as light as possible.

Unfortunately, I am massively obsessive over everything, (I once spent 3 weeks researching the taps I wanted for the house) I don't plan on deliberately ending up in a survival situation so obsessing over which tent has the best hydrostatic head rating (waterproof-ness) or the sleeping bag that goes to -40C has been a bit of a waste of time again so my focus has shifted to cost and what brands are worth looking at given how much junk there is out there and this is where Amazon had the answer! Amazon warehouse deals, I buy lots of stuff from this part of their site to great success, However, this could become be a little restrictive so for the challenge I will allow myself use of ebay also. Finally my expectations versus reality has come back into balance. 

Budget set at £200!