Five days of camp is deemed enough for the youngest scouts, so Adrian and Eric left for home today. The older scouts meanwhile head out for a hike. Since we are on an island, the means for that hike is canoes. The scouts packed up their gear, plus canvas for setting up shelters wherever they land, plus a lot of food, and off they paddled.

This morning the kitchen crew put in an extra burst of activity and packed meal materials for the hikers. Now there’s almost nothing for us to do. We’ll just be cooking a meal for ourselves and the small handful of camp leaders who stayed behind. After cooking for over two hundred people, twenty people feels like nothing at all.

This meant I had time for another hike of my own. Last time I did the west end of the island so now I headed east. The middle of the island was mostly inhabited and while it was green and pleasant it looked like any other little village (but with no cars). The easternmost end had some windy, rocky headlands with views of other nearby islands. There was no coastal path; the roads and paths were more like fingers on a hand, starting from the middle and reaching out, and ending in the driveway of the last house. So it was harder to walk along the actual coastline than on the west side. Still, a nice walk.

Today was activity day. All days at camp are activity days, but this one has extra many, extra great activities. There was everything from a homemade scout-built carousel, and a homemade catapult, to a spa and a face painting station. I saw Adrian trying out the catapult with water balloons. Meanwhile Ingrid painted.

Tonight the scouts also got dessert their evening meal. Hotan totan is a traditional scout dessert – oatmeal fried with lots of butter and sugar and some cinnamon. When cooked for 200+ scouts, the pans we use are the size of wagon wheels and butter is added in chunks of half a kilogram each.

I’ll be cooking dinner today but the other team is in charge of lunch, so I used my free morning to start exploring the island. It’s a small one, so I intend to walk most of it during my time here.

The camp kitchen is at one edge of the camp area. A path goes straight north from the kitchen so I just started following it. When it hit the north coast of the island, I randomly turned left and just thought I’d follow the coast back.

The north and north-west sides of the island were beautiful. The coast was rocky all the way, rather than boggy or wooded, and there were no houses close to the water so I could walk right along the edge. Sometimes it got steep and in a few places I had to go a bit further inland into the pine forest, but soon there was an opening again and I could walk in the open.

I have an app on my phone called Geotracker that I use for tracing my walks. It’s fun to see how far I’ve walked, and how much up and down. On trackless, planless walks like this, the app is also really useful because it gives me a good idea of how far I’ve gone and when I’m likely to be back. I may not be cooking lunch but I still need to be back in time to eat it!

On the south side of the island in a sheltered little cove I spotted a strange plant in the water. It’s like a fluffy mat of seaweed with little white flowers. I’ve never seen a floating, flowering plant before.

PS: I found out that the floating plant was probably Ranunculus peltatus (Water-crowfoot, särjesilm, sköldmöja.)

We are all here all day long, but I’ve barely seen Eric or the kids. Eric and Adrian I see briefly during my shifts in the kitchen when I serve food to everyone, but otherwise we all have our separate activities in different corners of the camp. Ingrid I didn’t see at all until I went exploring the camp and looking for her group. I found them cooking lunch over a campfire.

Today’s activities involved a lot of bathing. (Hence there are beach towels hanging everywhere on tents, tent ropes, aspen branches, temporary clotheslines etc.) The day was hot and the “beach” here is shallow and thus very warm. Someone’s waterproof watch reported 23°C in the water.

We are at scout camp. This first day ended with an inaugural camp fire with traditional (and non-traditional) scout songs.

This year’s camp is on Husarö island in the Stockholm archipelago. Instead of being stuck on a bus for four hours, we got a lovely cruise through the archipelago.

We’re on a permanent campground this time, and it comes with all kinds of nice conveniences, such as fireplaces, loos, some permanent tents, a root cellar and this little kitchen hut. (That white egg-shaped thing in the entrance into the root cellar.)

Packing for a week of scout camp. This year for the first time we’re all going. Eric as a scout leader, Ingrid and Adrian as scouts of course, and me as a cook again. We’ve had to buy more sleeping bags and another mattress to make sure everyone has proper gear.

For the last few years I’ve bought more and more packing bugs every time we travel, because I’ve gradually come to prefer these to the “traditional” method (i.e. what I learned from my mum) of packing in plastic bags, and probably also because the children and their clothes grow in size. But now I think we finally might have enough.

Adrian making pancakes for dinner.

The pool is a continued success. Endless amounts of splashing, making waves, and falling off things.

We awoke, very reluctantly, just after six in the morning because of some nutters who thought this was the best time to go out on the lake in a fishing boat. Car engine noise, repeated trips carrying equipment from car to boat, then plenty of rattling with chains and padlocks… it went on for long enough that there was no chance of staying asleep. When we met the nutters afterwards, they said they were from some environmental agency, inspecting the state of the fish population and thereby also the water quality. Great, I’m all for that, but I do not understand why they couldn’t take up their nets a few hours later.

Since we were up anyway, we might as well have breakfast. There were plenty of bilberry bushes everywhere around us, but the berries were few and small. It took quite a while to gather some to have with our porridge.


Afterwards we packed up our stuff and started the walk back. This trail was rougher than most marked hiking trails, with lots of fallen trees to get past. Sometimes over, sometimes under. And some, of course, just at that in-between height where it’s hard to fit under them, especially with a backpack, and hard to get over as well.


Just after halfway we passed a fireplace with nice views of another lake. Walking past this spot yesterday, the kids named this one “the fake lake” because at first glance it looked like it could be our tenting spot, but wasn’t. Since it looked so lovely yesterday, we planned a mid-morning stop here today, with a campfire and bread on a stick.


And whittling. Bread on a stick requires a good, smooth, clean stick, so Ingrid prepared one. Then the fire needed some time to burn, and what better way to pass the time than do some more whittling. When the breads had been eaten, the whittling continued. Adrian has no knife of his own yet so he borrowed mine, which left me with nothing much to do, other than taking photos. Both Ingrid and Adrian could probably have stayed there for much longer, but I got bored of waiting after some time, so we continued walking towards Brakmaren and the car.

This year’s scout camp is nearly here so we’ll get plenty of camping and outdoors activities soon. But Adrian still wanted to go camping with just us as well, and Ingrid came as well.

We’ve tented in Tyresta before, and Paradiset. Those two are my favourite nature reserves near Stockholm, beautiful and varied and easy to reach. This time I thought we’d try a new spot, so we aimed for a tenting spot next to lake Stensjön.

Somehow the preparations took me most of the day, even though I started just after breakfast. Getting all the gear, packing my own stuff, helping Adrian pack, shopping food, prepping food… by the time we were at the parking lot at Brakmaren, it was already six o’clock. We had a four-kilometre hike to the lake, and then there was a fire to build and light, and dinner to cook. (For dinner we had our traditional “hajkbomb” and then a delicious dessert of sauteed apples with chopped nuts and chocolate and cinnamon.)

Adrian went to sleep in the tent, while Ingrid and I went for a late night swim. There was a small island quite close to the shore – too far for the children to swim to on their own, but close enough for me and Ingrid. The weather was quite chilly so we didn’t stay on the island for more than just a moment. During our swim back, we had company of a bat that swooped by very close to us, just above the water.

When we got back, we found Adrian still awake, because the tent wasn’t like home, so we also went to bed to keep him company. Just as Ingrid went for a last pee in the dark, some animal rustled in the bushes right next to her. I joked about bears and elephants, but I wonder what it really was. Fox? (Those don’t make much noise, though, I believe…) Badger?