Vacationing in the 80s vs. now

Growing up, my parents took my sister and me camping every year. And every year, it would be at a campground relatively close to the German border. That way, we could do some shopping across the border. (Fewer taxes on goods and especially beer and wine). We often camped with my aunt and uncle and their kids. 2 of my cousins were close in age to my sister and me; they were a year younger than us (my oldest cousin was a year younger than me, the younger a year younger than my sister) so we had a lot of fun.
My aunt and uncle owned a combi-camp or a pop-up camper. It’s a really big tent on a trailer, but it meant that we slept in tiny compartments off the ground — one for each family.

When my cousins got a baby brother, the arrangement changed ever so slightly. It was one compartment for us older kids, one for my mom, my aunt, and the baby, and my dad and uncle got to sleep on foldout beds in the front tent (which was attached to the compartments, so really just an additional bedroom/room). My dad slept next to the stove so he could cook the baby oatmeal as soon as he woke up….because he would wake up screaming until he got fed. (He’s now in his 30s and still loves food….. some things never change).

We met a lot of kids on those trips, mostly from different countries. As the oldest, it was my job to communicate with these foreign kids, so I had some basic German and English down at a relatively young age.
I was a shy kid but somehow still managed to be the front runner during these trips, which is funny, considering how I would make my little sister be the spokesperson for everything we did outside of the family when we were home. She was very much a social butterfly even back then, much like my father, who can talk to anyone. And communicate with anyone even though he might not know more than just a bit of basic English and intermediate German (he worked in Germany when I was a baby).

By the time I was 10, my parents had decided it was time to try something else. They wanted something more permanent for their vacation time, so they got a summer house (or holiday home).
It wasn’t a castle….or even a big house. It was more of a cabin in the woods type of thing, which was/is relatively uncommon in Denmark.
The house was three rooms. A living room, just big enough for a small couch and a dining room table for four people (6 if we were creative), a bedroom with two bunk beds (4 sleeping spots), and a tiny narrow kitchen. None of the rooms had doors, just a curtain separating them. Running water in the kitchen but only cold. And the stove was a gas stove (also not super common in Denmark at the time, most are electrical), and the living room had a wood stove which was the primary heat source. That and the gazillion of oil lamps that were in the house. And candles. Because it didn’t have electricity. (Every night was game night because there wasn’t much else to do besides reading).

And that brings me to the last ‘room’ in the house, which technically wasn’t in the house, and actually didn’t get to be an integrated part of the house for almost 20 years. It was slowly incorporated, but wasn’t actually more than an attachment where you’d have to leave the ‘main’ house to go sit and ponder….. The And that brings me to the last ‘room’ in the house, which technically wasn’t in the house, and actually didn’t get to be an integrated part of the house for almost 20 years. It was slowly incorporated but wasn’t more than an attachment where you’d have to leave the ‘main’ house to go sit and ponder….. The loo. Or the outhouse, as it truly was in the beginning. Nothing more than a bucket under a seat and a roll of toilet paper. Every day my dad dug a hole on the property (which fortunately was enormous, even though the house wasn’t). The only time my dad asked my cousin and me to empty it, he deeply regretted it. We were young and new to this poop-in-a-bucket kind of a thing, so when he tasked us with the job, we weren’t sure where to put the waste. We asked, and he jokingly told us to throw it in the trees toward the neighbors. We believed he was serious, and so we did. He wasn’t…., but he fixed it because it was his mistake (and he didn’t trust us to clean up the mess properly).

Over time we went through the evolution of the toilet, from bucket to water closet with a chain to pull (which sounded like a foghorn when flushing) to a modern toilet.

Eventually, we also got hot water in the house. And they added a shower outback. I guess using a bucket for showering (not the same as the toilet…) with water heated up on the stove got a little old.
They got the water heating for both the shower and the kitchen sink by getting a gas-heated water heater, which was fine and dandy, except for the tiny little hiccup of a leaking gas hose. It was up for a couple of weeks before it turned into an issue, but in the end, it almost burned the house down. The little pilot flame and the sudden burst of gas from the hose didn’t mix well with an old wooden house. But it got fixed like everything else around the house.

While they kept adding and expanding to the old house and modernizing it little by little, in the end, they still tore down the old house and built a completely new house on the ground, almost five times the size of the original one. Mainly because they were planning on spending a lot of time there when they retired (which they have.) It still isn’t as big as most other holiday homes, but at least now it’s got two bedrooms and a little nook in the living room. And a guest hut. Which is just a bedroom and a bathroom, but still.

I thoroughly enjoy their new house, but I do miss the simplicity of the old house. The bad reading light from the oil lamps or having to watch TV on a tiny black/white TV screen powered by a car battery, not so much.