We got up fairly early that day; gathered all the remains of our candy and ran up to the little dam, and this time we were staying. We'd picked out the spot for the campfire days in advance--among the stones of a little island created by the draught--it was the only place one could safely put up a fire without burning down the entire hillside. That's where we dropped all our stuff and went swimming in the pool.
Now once again I'll have to explain my lack of enthusiasm for a certain kind of activity; I don't like camping. I don't like having my lungs filled with smoke from the camp-fire, I don't like burnt food, I don't like being far away from TV and computers, I don't like being cold and I most certainly do not like trying to fall asleep on the hard ground knowing that before morning some mosquito is going to fly home very drunk on my blood. So please do tell me; why do I still have so much fun whenever I do go camping.
I think we spent the entire day underwater, I was one step away from growing gills and webbing between my fingers and toes.
When at last we got out of the water I was so starved I could happily have eaten a mammoth--raw. Luckily we'd brought sausages, cheese-sandwiches, corncobs and marshmallows, so we didn't have to go mammoth-hunting. What we hadn't brought was firewood. And we needed wood badly.
Now, of cause there were a half-dozen good solutions to that problem: First of all it was high-summer, dry as the dessert and we could easily have burned just about anything. Secondly there were three different dead trees near the riverside--probably lightning-struck--each of which were perfect for burning. Not only that; by the path we had walked up just hours before, piles of old planks--probably a retired fence--offered the perfect settlement. But did we jump at such an obvious solution? No--because we're not that kind of people. We decided to go scrimping for firewood on the farm.
It was dark, no moon nor stars shone from the murky sky. Two dark figures lurked trough the darkness in search for a victim. They found it.
By the barn-wall we found an enormous pile of nice dry firewood. We admired the character of the poor idiot who'd spent all summer chopping wood, for a few moments--then we stole it. Well of cause we didn't steal it all! We talked about it though--how fun it would be if the farmer woke up in the morning and found his entire wood-stack stolen--we soon reached the conclusion that it would be more work stealing all that wood than it would be chopping it. And we would be the only suspects--there's nobody else around. We also decided that if we were going to commit a crime we were going to steal the tractor not the firewood.
We walked back up the path in the darkness, and as luck had it we were eaten by neither cows, trolls nor mammoths. We saw a frog though, but it showed no sign of malice.
Sitting around the fire we discovered that neither of us knew any camp-fire songs. As a matter of fact the only song the both of us seemed to know was Puff the Magic Dragon, The Gummi Bears theme and a whole bunch of Christmas-carols. So there we were sitting around the fire singing Christmas-carols--in August--while roasting marshmallows.
By the time we'd finished eating it was so dark I couldn't see a thing, and considering the fact that we were sitting in the middle of the river I had a bit of a problem getting back ashore. This resulted in a midnight-swim. Sunni was enjoying herself (I think she's at least one part mermaid and one part evil sadist), I was cold; the fish were scared.
I only had minor difficulties finding my sleeping bag, the biggest problem we had was lighting the mosquito-spiral--the smelly way to keep bugs at a fair distance--but once that was done I actually fell asleep.
It wasn't really all that bad when I come to think of it.
Introduction