Most of the day the supply tent had a steady flow of visitors. And while I could let them manage on their own – take whatever they need and put it back wherever seems good – it (a) doesn’t feel right and (b) would probably cause a big mess after a while. So I hung around. (And dried more tarps, and chased down tools that never came back, and untangled rope.) But I did take time for a brief photo walk in the evening, to a nearby ruined old water mill.

Today was very busy and I barely had a break all day. Apart from the hottest hours of the day, in the early afternoon, which were very hot. I spent those just sitting in my camp chair, occasionally dunking my head in water, waiting for the heat to pass.

In between handing out axes and saws and duct tape and sisal twine, I was drying and re-folding tarps, after all the rain we’ve had. Tarps are apparently yet another essential component of scout camp.

When the night curfew arrived and all the scouts were in their tents and no one wanted any more sisal, I went swimming. There’s a decent beach maybe half a kilometre away from the camp, and at ten o’clock at night it was nearly deserted. I could wash, and swim, and just generally relax.

I was not the only one to catch a stomach bug here at camp. And my symptoms were mild; others have it much worse and are being sent home. The medical team (yes, we have a whole team) have been to the nearest hospital and returned with lots of hand sanitizer, and split up the loos and hand-washing stations by scout group to minimize the risk of the infection spreading.

The supply manager was among those, so this evening I was hastily promoted from assistant to supply manager. I now have a whole tent full of stuff to manage. I have no real clue about what’s in here or what I’m really supposed to do with it all.

So I’m making it up as I go along. Answering “yes” when people come and ask for stuff, working under the assumption that most reasonable requests have been foreseen and prepared for – and then digging through the boxes and crates to find it.

PS: I later learned that the doctors were mere hours away from shutting down the camp because the stomach bug was spreading so alarmingly fast. None of the scouts knew, of course – they just grumbled over all the hand-washing and sanitizing they were forced to do before each meal. I also learned that the root cause was a single scout who had arrived at camp with diarrhoea. And by doing that, almost ruined it for two hundred people. Parents, don’t be idiots and send sick kids to camp.

Today was camp building day.

After yesterday, we had only the bare minimum of a camp. All the tents went up of course: sleeping tents as well as tents for all the special functions such as kitchen, medical, supply etc. But that was it. The camp was liveable but bare.

Today – between the rain showers – the scouts built all kinds of amenities and decorations. A flagpole, of course. Stands for the hand-washing basins and washing-up tubs. Clothes lines. Sheltered benches and tables for mealtimes. A portal for the camp as a whole, and for all the “villages” for the different groups.

The number one camp building material is birch poles.

The number two camp building material is sisal twine.

The camp uses enormous amounts of both. Literally hundreds of birch poles, and hundreds of metres of twine.

The number one construction element is the tripod. First-year scouts may not manage the advanced structures that the older ones build – strong enough to climb on – but they quickly learn to make tripods, and you can get far with those. Make a tripod, and you have a washbasin stand. Make two, and add a long horizontal pole on top, and you have a portal, or the skeleton of a shelter.

The reason I’m talking about building materials today, instead of kitchen utensils, is because I was kicked out of the kitchen. I caught some kind of stomach ailment and the medical team banned me from even being in the kitchen for the next 48 hours at least. So instead I am now assisting the supply manager, handing out tools and materials to whoever needs them, and sometimes even getting them back afterwards.

Scout camp near Vallsta in Hälsingland. Changeable weather.

I’m here as part of the kitchen crew again, but not in charge this time. Just chopping and cooking. Today’s dinner was sausage Stroganoff. I was responsible for the special versions – vegetarian, vegan, dairy-free and tomato-free. It was quite a challenge – not just to get four meals done at the same time, but to not mix them up and accidentally pour milk in the vegan version etc.

Cooking at this camp is pretty challenging in general. Because of the long drought, a complete open burning prohibition is in force in most of Sweden right now. That means no campfires, no camp stoves, no barbecues, no fires outdoors, whatsoever, period. For a scout camp, that’s like cutting off our arms.

The campfires that we won’t have this year are just a cosmetic problem. But all food is cooked over camping stoves. All the older scouts normally cook their own meals over Trangia stoves. The meals for the younger scouts are prepared by the kitchen crew over big stoves (large double burners, attached to large tanks of LPG).

With open fires forbidden, all that becomes impossible, so the camp was nearly cancelled when the prohibition was announced. By a massive stroke of luck, the camping ground here turned out to have a garage or shed of some kind where we can put up the stoves, so the camp got the go-ahead after all.

When I was a child, the cake I always had for my birthday was a redcurrant merengue cake. We couldn’t find any redcurrants today, so this is a raspberry and blackberry merengue cake.

Back then, a birthday with just one cake was no birthday. My other cake was often an upside-down pineapple cake (without any artificial-looking canned cherries) or a kringel, which is a filled and braided bread. The internet seems to think it should be filled with cinnamon, but I remember raisins and chopped nuts and a chocolatey glaze.

I now have a pink balloon dog on my desk. A dachshund poodle.

On the ferry from Tallinn back to Stockholm, there was entertainment for the kids, including a lady who made balloon animals for the kids.

It’s not like this was the first time they saw one of those balloon dogs… but for some reason, this time Adrian really fell in love with those balloons and wanted to make his own. We bought balloons and a pump, and he went wild. Ingrid also made some, but Adrian was completely obsessed. He stayed up past sundown, twisting more and more balloons into all kinds of creations. Several dogs, but also many, many swords (which was the easiest model to make) and lots of free-form doodles and squiggles.

The ugly electrical cabinets at our street corner have bothered us for a long while. A neighbour (who also has an electrical cabinet) has prettified theirs with an oilcloth cover. We now have the same. They definitely look more cheerful this way. And the white-and-green colours match the dogwood bushes.

We’re heading home again.

We usually stop for a picnic lunch when we’re about two thirds of the way from Tartu to Tallinn. There is a real shortage of nice stopping places along that road. The roadside cafés we’ve tried have all been dingy and unpleasant. Sometimes I’ve simply turned into a random small road off the highway and then stopped as soon as we get some distance away from the highway. Beats having a picnic in a parking lot, but not by much…

The one nice place I’ve found is the churchyard of Anna church. There’s a small meadow in front of the church and a larger one behind the churchyard. They’re grassy and shady, and we have the pretty church and the wooded little graveyard to look at.

There is an old school cool water pump in the meadow behind the churchyard. Not made for Adrian-sized users.