As others have said, either wind in the Thule awning as far as it’ll go, or fit the plastic fig of 8 strips to the top edge. We use both techniques depending on some factors:
Use the bottom connection with a driveaway kit if:
- going to be disconnecting / reconnecting a number of times
- the ground slopes upwards from the drivers side
Use the top connection with fig of 8 strips only if:
- not going to be disconnecting much / at all (Tricky re-attaching the awning once fully pegged down, and its a 2-person job)
- the ground slopes down from the drivers side (making it impossible to open the sliding door if using the bottom connection)
- it’s going to be raining quite a bit (fewer drips past the van door with this method).
A few other things we’ve learned :
1. We started off with helicopter tape on the top edge, to limit scratching, but in warm weather it gets soft, and it’s harder to clip on the plastic fig of 8 strips. So we removed it a few weeks ago. I don’t think the plastic strips will do much damage.
2. The top connection method puts more angular force through the plastic strips. One of ours started to crack in half the last time we did this a few weeks ago. It was about 3 years old - Vango. Luckily we had some spare (Dometic) strips which are softer material, but can pull out of a kador.
3. We’ve also tried the top connection using a kador strip, and 2nd set of fig of 8 strips, to try and improve the reconnection method. It was hopeless ! Everything kept sliding around - as Brucie would have said, ‘Good game, good game!’
4. When using the bottom connection, it’s worth cutting the kador strip to the inside dimension of the Thule awning, so you don’t crease the kador when winding in the Thule, and it can be wound back to the max. A few mm can make the difference in the side door catching the strips or not.