Day 8. Camp is over and we’ll soon be home.

I have actually stood on that little skerry with a lone tree growing on it. I swam to it on one of the really hot days earlier this week.

I can’t remember exactly which pier I started from, but I know for sure that it wasn’t the one in the foreground here – it must have been somewhere near those boat sheds on the left. That islet didn’t seem very far when I saw it from the shore, but seen from here it looks a bit longer. It’s hard to judge the distance across emptiness. I wish I had walked up to that tree to measure myself against it, but I didn’t think of it at the time.

Today was a hot day. Ingrid and I took an ice cream break in the afternoon.

In the evening, after making a gazillion packed lunches for tomorrow’s trip home, and packing up box after box of kitchen gear, I took another long walk. I haven’t quite walked full circle around the island, mostly because some parts of the coastline are not walkable. But today I filled in some gaps in the central and northern part of it.

Nice, but that rocky coast I saw on my first walk here was still the best.

Back at the camp one of the leaders had baked fresh bread from the morning’s leftover porridge. Yum.

I had a free afternoon and I used it to get myself clean.

My hike around the western end of Husarö a few days ago showed me that that part of the island was effectively deserted. So today I walked back to a nice little cove that I discovered then, got naked and washed myself clean.

And then had a nice long swim, still naked. That feeling of freedom was delicious. I haven’t done this in donkey’s years but it was so nice that I may have to find a nude beach next summer.

Wikipedia has an interesting article on the history of nude swimming, by the way.

In the evening I walked away from the camp again to get a self-portrait. Here I am, complete with puffy face (I get that when I’m outdoors and I don’t know why), a scout shirt, a spork in my breast pocket, and a mosquito on my temple.

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.