My tent looks ridiculously small inbetween all the caravans on this campsite. They stand side by side, close together and I'm happy my neighbour is a huge old tent that hasn't been used for a while, turned all green.
Today is Ermanno's birthday. The big 40. A border I already passed. Like most borders it is an artificial one, but I can say I quite like it on the other side. I hope he will too.
I had planned (the word "planned" shows up a lot in my reports) to move on, like I'm moving on every day but after I packed my bag, just in time for the rain to start, and wanted to lift it, I made a wrong move and couldn't move for a few seconds. Damn.
There was no way I could carry 10kg on my back and walk. So I stayed.
Staying is always good. It isn't easy though. It took me a few hours before I could stop trying to find a solution and just sat down and stayed.
Around three I walked to the village where I hadn't been yet, it was hot, I passed the small wood in front of the camp site and smelled the warm pine trees, a smell that always brings me back to the summers (or was it only one summer?) when I was a kid and we spent our holidays in a cottage in the woods near a lake somewhere in the south of holland. Me and my parents and my two sisters, one of them is married to Ermanno now.
I walked on, looking for a place to eat some nice birthday pie but couldn't find anywhere where I wanted to sit down. Then I suddenly remembered Ermanno didn't like pie. So I went to the shop, bought what he liked eating on birthdays and carried it to the camp site. It was big. A huge golden vanilla cake. I could make some new friends.
The rest of the day I sat in the small wood, ate vanilla cake, drank a beer, listened to some music for the first time in nine days. In the evening we skyped, Ermanno and his family. Three small, very blond and very cute kids tried to climb into the computer and give me drawings. Ermanno showed me the watch he got today. It will enable him to know for sure time is passing. His 6 year old son showed me the hole in his mouth. He lost his first tooth. I thought of the Nova my Danish friend wrote me about the other day.
There I was, on a campsite under a tree, sitting in the dark next to my miniature house, holding a 10 inch screen in my hand talking to my relatives in another country, seeing their faces, the caravans in the background. For a moment I felt as if I was in some science fiction series, star trek maybe. Then Ermanno looked at his watch. It was time.
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