Burkarskis do Europe 2023 - Closing Circle
Overview
| Rating |
🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻 |
|---|---|
| Year Traveled |
2023 |
| Length of Trip |
2 Weeks |
| Locations Visited |
Baarlo, ND |
Sunday - Closing Circle and Subtropisch Zwemparadijs
Sunday at a Hash Weekend is like the last day of summer camp. Time to pack up and say goodbye. Since Michael still isn’t feeling well we find some cold medicine at the camp store. The woman running the store doesn’t speak any English and my Dutch isn’t good enough to describe the difference between cold symptoms and allergy symptoms. We end up googling every single drug name on that little shelf to see what does what.
Our Fat Boy trail is one last walk around the castle and into town, this time crossing on a ferry. We visited a cool lookout tower on the way, and in town we found a garden.
Closing circle was overly long, as to be expected. They had a tent setup in the courtyard for us but it was not large enough for everyone. And it was way too hot in the sun. We found a little ledge in the shade to sit. We abandoned circle when the crew taking the bus back to Amsterdam left. Michael and I had a spare night in our trailer so we planned to check out the little water park and laundry room.
I was promised a hotwhirlpool but it was extremely tepid. And even though we’d been sweating in the sun all weekend, we went into the Turkish steam bath and dry sauna to sweat some more.
Laundry was a disaster. I bought detergent from the camp store from the same lady from the morning and she was done with my poor use of Dutch. Michael and I spent a lot of time trying to find the laundry room. The map showed one at the bathhouse nearest to our trailer but it wasn’t there. A much further bathhouse did have it. So I dragged my laundry and and detergent and all the euro change we had to that laundry room. But the coin accepter on the machine never said anything other than 0.00. And the machine wouldn’t start and kept giving the message that I needed to pay. And any denomination of coin I dropped in just rolled right through to coin return. The instructions on the wall said, “munt inwerpen,” which just means, “insert coin.” No where did it say how much laundry cost or what type of coins the machine accepted. Our best guess is that it uses some kind of token but the registration castle had already closed 30 minutes ago so there was no one to ask. We never got any laundry done.
Our dinner was at the camp’s bar. Typical pub food and beer on a patio. Everything came with fries. This turns out to be a problem for me later.
We relax at our cabins patio before bed. I had picked up two beers from the camp store on my laundry detergent expedition and once again made the mistake of picking a European IPA. This is my last European IPA for a while as I finally learned my lesson.
But as I find out later once home, the two beers I grabbed from the camp store weren’t just any random brand. They were Foxwild beers, a vanity brand for Dutch entrepreneur Peter Gillis. I’d seen this guy on a huge poster at the Vakantiepark in an ad for a reality tv show, Familie Gillis: Massa is Kassa. I didn’t know what that TV show had to do with the park; my guess at the time was the family took a vacation at one of these campgrounds and filmed an episode there and the campground wanted to use it as promotion. But it turns out this guy owns the chain of campgrounds. AND that is not the end of this story. He’s in trouble for committing tax fraud, employing undocumented immigrants at these campgrounds, and violence against his ex-girlfriend.
I had been wondering why the portion of our group in the campground seemed so thin and spread out. I had expected us taking over a block or lane of campsites. But our campers were scattered and the total number of us was fewer than I imagined. It turns out that when registrants failed to make their final payments instead of opening those slots to wait-listers, they were closed off. 144 out of 200 campground reservations for our group were cancelled. The event organizers wanted to reduce the risk of having to refund or rehouse us if the campground went out of business!