So. Everything I’ve posted since coronavirus took over the world was written and scheduled around Christmas and the first half of January. Now we settle properly into the oddities of maintaining a travel blog when no one can travel.
So what I’m going to do is metaphorically invite you to join me around the campfire and I’ll tell you tales of the olden days, when it was safe to go outside.
Starting when I was five or so, my family went camping every summer. To France at first, then Austria, Italy, Italy & Austria and once to Spain. We went with a holiday company called Keycamp. They don’t exist anymore but their sister company, Eurocamp, is still around. I’m a Keycamper to my core. I’ve been Eurocamping but it goes against the grain. But… I don’t really understand why there were two companies in the first place. When you get two sister companies offering the same service, usually you can see a difference: the value one Vs the premium one is easy to spot. But the only discernable difference seemed to be that Keycamp was blue and yellow while Eurocamp was green and red.
Both offered a range of static caravans of broadly identical spec, with different umbrellas outside. Both offered pre-pitched tents that resembled bungalows, with electric lighting and fridge and a gas stove. Two bedrooms that could be zipped into three or four. Keycamp bedrooms opened off a central corridor while Eurocamp ones opened straight into the living room.
That’s not enough to justify two companies. Both offered kids’ clubs – sometimes joint, sometimes separate. Both were staffed by “couriers”, who were either university-aged kids on a long paid holiday or retired couples on a long paid holiday. Their job was to clean the accommodation between guests, look after guests, run the kids’ clubs, provide information and run an occasional party evening. They usually had bikes to get around the campsite and you’d see them most days trundling a new gas canister off to one caravan or another.
Somehow, by the time I was 21, it became cheaper to rent an apartment than a tent or caravan. Well, caravan. By then, even those apartment-like tents were a bit too feral for my mum. The nightly family TSB run to the washblock before bed wasn’t so much a ritual as a pain.
But for a kid, or a teenager, what more could you want from a holiday than a campsite? We spent a lot of holidays at a site outside Zell am See in Austria and I could paint you a photorealistic picture of every inch of that site.
Sportcamp Woferlgut was a small family-run campsite back then. Everyone knew Wolfgang, the owner. He had a ride-on lawnmower and a set of little carriages and he’d drive this miniature train around the campsite any spare minute of the day.
My mum described the pool as being “pocket handkerchief sized” and it was. It had a slide at the deep end. I caught my hand and sliced a tiny but perfectly round single layer of skin off the side of my hand on that slide once. Such a tiny injury. No blood, no real pain but it put me off pool slides pretty much for life.
At the back of the campsite, there was a part that went under the main road to a second field. In that field there were some tennis courts but there was also a small private lake for boating activities and proper pool fun. We hired canoes once but mostly we did nothing more than paddle in it. Behind that, a path led up the nearest mountain. Was it a big mountain? No, it was a rolling gentle green hill of a mountain and still probably not as big as I think it was. Me and my dad tried to climb it. I don’t imagine we got far.
But mostly what we did was go to the playground. I don’t think it was much of a playground. The only thing I vividly remember was a barrel mounted on two poles that turned freely if you scrambled up and ran on it. I used to spend hours on that barrel. We played badminton in the road outside the caravan. Very little traffic on a small campsite in the late 90s. We moved if anything came along and then went back out. On our first day onsite we’d go to the courier’s tent and borrow Cluedo and that occupied our evenings.
In the mornings we’d get up and go to the onsite shop for fresh bread – semmels, they were called, round bread rolls with a big thumb dent in the too, split into five swirling sections. We had butter and jam and Marmite in the tent and we’d sit outside the tent most mornings eating fresh bread for breakfast. That’s still my favourite part of camping, that lazy outside breakfast, although these days when I camp, it happens on a groundsheet on the floor instead of at a plastic table and chair set. When we went out, which was most days, we usually came back with cakes or fruit tarts of some kind to eat in the late afternoon, dad on his sunlounger, the rest of us at the table like civilised beings.
I can still smell the little shop. I can feel the mist on the mountain opposite. I can taste the orange drink (colour rather than flavour) made with water from the outside watertap someone had just poured his bathroom waste water down. Please let that be the grey water rather than the contents of the chemical toilet, please. I can see Harry, our courier, playing the accordion and doing Jake the Peg, to much astonishment from the teenager who couldn’t figure out which was the fake leg.
An apartment in a chalet in a village felt very exposed after fifteen or so years of that. I think buying a touring caravan is an incredibly expensive way to not go far (you spend £30k on the caravan, then have to upgrade the towing car, buy all the accessories and toys, insurance and storage and then go three times a year, every year, to a campsite less than two hours from home? I could work miracles with that kind of money!) but summer holidays on a campsite genuinely are amazing.