Outdoor essentials: Pop-up sun cabana

Everyone’s got a few products that they absolutely love. One of mine? A pop-up sun cabana that has turned out to be a “how did we live without?” item for our household.

This is our pop-up cabana:

I purchased this over eight years ago from the now-defunct One Step Ahead catalog of innovative products for kids. At the time, our daughter was playing youth soccer, and I had a newborn baby boy to tote around to springtime soccer games. He was too young to put sunscreen on, and I wanted something with a little more coverage than a sun umbrella. I spotted this “Sun Smarties” cabana in the catalog for $49.95, and even though it wasn’t cheap, we bought it.

It turned out to be a great purchase for our family. The cabana came in its own little backpack/tote, and it weighs less than 5 pounds. Pull it out of the bag and give it a shake, and it pops up on its own. It has a spring frame and doesn’t require any poles or staking, although you can secure it with stakes if you’d like. The fabric is zinc-lined to block the sun when you’re sitting inside. It’s got a zipper door in the back that you can open to let the air through. And, it folds up just as easily and slides right back into its bag.

Fast-forward more than eight years, and this pop-up cabana is still one of our family’s most-used items, especially in the summer. It lives in my vehicle and comes with us for any pool or beach day trips. Our kids love to pop it up and use it as an indoor “campout” free-standing tent in the living room. It’s served as a rain shelter for parade watching on drizzly days and Boy Scout cave camping when the cave’s roof dripped water all night. It’s awesome, versatile, and so easy to use. It’s bigger than it looks, too. Two adults can comfortably lay down side by side in it, and you can sit under it either on the ground or in beach chairs like the ones my kids are in above.

Seriously, take a moment and allow me to pop this thing up and down for you. It’s fantastic:

If you take it to the beach, the directions recommend filling the cabana’s side pockets with sand to weigh it down. My tip: Stick a few gallon Ziploc bags in the pockets, and when you go to the beach, fill the bags with the sand and slip them in the pockets. It makes cleanup even easier! We have a small, 6-can sized cooler that, when full of bottled water or cans, fits inside one of the pockets to hold it down too.

So why am I writing this post? Every time I pull this cabana out of its bag and pop it up, someone asks where I got it. Last week at the pool, several people (including two of my readers!) asked where to get one.

I promised to post a link to the site I bought ours from… and then I learned that the One Step Ahead catalog is no longer around. (Their website says the company was sold to the Swiss Colony and will be back online at some point.) So, I started searching the web. Surely they weren’t the only company making such a fun, useful, compact cabana, right?

And as I searched, I spotted a nearly-identical cabana to ours – the Shade Shack:

This cabana is almost exactly the same as the one we have, with two exceptions. One, the colors are different. Two, this one has roll-up windows on the sides for added ventilation. The cabana size, 90″ x 53″ x 51″, is the same. And, Amazon has them for $49.95 with free shipping, so the price hasn’t gone up in the past 8+ years either..! (Shade Shack’s own website sells them for the same price, plus $12 to ship.)

I’ll leave you with this. I took the kids swimming today and of course brought the cabana along. Next to us was another family setting up a fiberglass-pole frame cabana that was built like a tent – they were staking it out, putting all the poles together and bickering trying to hold it up and slide the poles in. I pulled ours out, shook it once and it popped right up. The husband next to us said to his wife, “Why didn’t we get one like that?”

If you’re in the market for something like this, I highly, highly recommend it.