Really this business of posting on FB then nicking the posts for the blog is getting to be a bit of a bad habit. I have never been very good at kicking bad habits, which is why the wine stash bought in France for the whole trip is not going to last us much beyond Copenhagen and why this is another filched Facebook post....
Otterbergets Bad & Camping is not bad at all, in fact it's one of those places you may be tempted to describe as a 'nice spot' if you were given to saying such things. It's by a lake with a forested shore, in other words it's in Sweden. Also, being 'not bad' doesn't mean it was great, at least from our point of view.
Our arrival was complicated by yet another smartcard failure. We carry two camping discount cards, Acsi and Camping Key Europe, the latter card is useful in places like Portugal and Sweden where Acsi sites are less common. We bought a new Camping Key card specially for this trip and had used it without a problem in Denmark. When the receptionist swiped it here the system flagged up the card was out of date and we needed a new one. Gill pointed out that the expiry date printed on the card was 2020, so it must be valid. The person at the till went into 'the computer says no ' mode and got on her mobile to 'phone the boss'.
In fact two bosses arrived - the site is Dutch run, a process of extremely straightforward problem solving ensued - where inadvertently or not, the gist of ensuing conversation felt as if this was our problem and at some inconvenience for the site owners they were going to have to find a solution. The solution was to book us onto the Swedish Camping Key system which involved typing all my personal details into their computer - Name, Address, DOB, email, mobile number - all of which was required because the Camping Key smartcard can be used as proof of identity and the mobile app is being tested in Sweden. This explained why a card bought in the UK is not going to work. All of this took ages and resulted in a bit of irritation all round. My general mood was not improved by the Dutch guy making a failed attempt at humour by suggesting that the girl on the computer's difficulties in finding 'Great Britain' on the drop down menu for 'nationality' was probably due to Brexit. Next he mistook my date of birth as 1945; I began to wonder if he was deliberately winding me up - really, do I look 74 years of age?
Finally after a protracted and slightly fraught process we were booked-in for two nights. Our next request, again a simple one, proved equally inexplicably tricky. We needed to dump our grey water. There was a simple reason why our waste water tank smelled as if something small and furry had drowned in it and was now slowly decomposing, sadly our dish water had been festering for days. It is really tricky to find places to dump waste water in Sweden. For all the excellently designed 'stellplatts' at marinas and by canals, with heated showers blocks, spotless stainless steel chemical WC emptying points, few places have grey water drains. The folks running them are very apologetic, but that is no help whatsoever if alien ectoplasm is multiplying exponentially beneath your van's bathroom floor.
OK, it was pure happenstance that an English cess-pit on wheels had rolled up at precisely the moment Mr. Dutch Campsite owner was fixing the only waste water dump in southern Scandinavia. Our need definitely placed us in the difficult customer category.
'I will finish in 15 minutes,' he asserted somewhat icily. We found a temporary pitch and settled down to have lunch until the service point became serviceable. The young woman in the tent next to us gave us a hard look, we may have accidentally transgressed the three metres separation rule. It all made us feel quite at home, Caravan Club sites have exactly the same stuffy, rulebound atmosphere.
Half an hour or so later we went in search of the waste water dump, its whereabouts had been circled in bold on the campsite plan we had been given, especially to help the these two stupid foreigners I think. The place was nowhere to be found; we even tried turning the plan upside down, but it still remained a mystery. This was because we had been looking for a drain, not some strange Heath Robinson contraption attached to a flexible pipe stashed in a shed. In fairness we had once come across something very similar at Camping Koroni on the Peloponnese.
However, whereas Zorba the Greek's moveable drain was crafted out of bits of plastic drainpipe stuck together with duck tape, the installation we were faced with now was a much more substantial affair. Built with solidity of Soviet era tank, the stainless steel 'drain box' on wheel was attached to the culvert by a flexible heavy duty rubberised hose. A long metal handle attached to the box enabled long suffering moho owners to guide the contraption under their van and line it up with the grey water outlet. I turned on the tap, the steel box filled with smelly water but none drained away. Gill popped back back to reception for assistance. 'Make sure the pipe is perfectly flat' campsite guy advised grumpily. It was true, I had not noticed a small kink in the hose near where it disappeared into the ground. Now perfectly flat, the waste water slowly drained away. The receptionist had followed Gill back, she observed us momentarily, advising 'Water does not run uphill you know.' A needlessly acid remark I felt under the circumstances.
Should we let these small incidents get us down? Probably not, but a series of minor setbacks do have a cumulative effect, and how you are treated does matter. If people are kind then it's easier to brush off glitches, if they are sarcastic it becomes more difficult to take things in good heart.
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| Through the forest |
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| with occasional views of the lake... |
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| with time to pause for thought, such as 'my that is a tall tree', |
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| then back to the campsite.... |
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| Most people don't seem to budge from their pitches, the lake shore was mostly deserted apart from us. |
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| It would be difficult to sit indoors with this happening about 200 metres distant. |
Getting out to explore the area without a car is a bit tricky. Cycling opportunities are limited unless you are into off road stuff. The site is down a single track road off the E20. It does not seem to interconnect with other minor roads so it would be impossible, so far as we could tell, to explore more of the lake area without returning to the busy dual carriageway.
This goes someway to explain the camp site's popularity with caravanners, not just from Sweden, there were a few from Germany and Holland too. They weren't a very affable bunch, a friendly smile was rarely returned. The site is perfect if 'peace and quiet', nice views and places to go for a day out are your top priority, which is I suppose what you would hanker after if you owned a caravan.
This led us to speculate that Sweden may be like the UK, traditionally a caravanning nation where motorhome ownership has only risen sharply in recent years, appealling particular to the recently retired. In Sweden you see very few vans more than a couple of years old, many swanky A class models, almost all owned by fellow sixty somethings. If this is the case it is unsurprising that sites lack well designed drive on motorhome service points because up until recently there was little need for them.
Next day it rained incessantly. The site itself does not have its own WiFi but you can buy access on-line to a national provider. Costing about £2.50 for 24hrs, it's not too bad. The signal was a tad 'wafty' but with patience it proved good enough to update the blog which was now lagging a week behind us.
There are places, like people, where you simply don't hit it off. In other circumstances we probably could have been perfectly happy here. As it is, it will remain in our memories as somewhere slightly odd. An example - once again we took a stroll down to the lake. Aside from following one of the hiking trails, when the weather was too chilly to lounge about or cook outside, staring at the lake was just about the only other diversion available. Apart from us, the only people on the beach was a woman and a girl aged about seven or so.
The woman may have been the same person who glared at me yesterday for parking too close to the tent next to us, she was some way off, difficult to be sure. Anyway, the two may have been mother and daughter, if they were, they seemed very disconnected.
The little girl perched on the playground swings motionless, the woman sitting 15m or so from her reading. Then she moved further up the beach and worked through a few yoga poses...marjariasana, chakrasana...
Left to her own devices the child alighted from the swing, removed both her yellow wellies and entertained herself by filling one boot with sand, then pouring it carefully into the other. The entire scene unfolded before us with the quiet, monochromatic solemnity of a Scandinavian art house film from the mid 1970s, uncanny and oppressive.
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