A trip to remember

My father made us 'do' Copenhagen on the cheap by buying a Dormobile and a second-hand 2 man pup tent for 'the boys' (as if you could use a collective term for a sadistic thug of an acquisitive, amoral elder brother and an introverted, bookish younger sibling - both over 6' - constantly at war).  "It will be educational..."

2 weeks of driving in a battered old camper van at never more than 45 mph through the Low Countries (so named because slow, long-distance travel on endless flat autobahns is horrible). Nights spent rolling up to campsites putting up a ropy old tent in the near dark with your mortal enemy before squeezing back into the van to eat warmed through tinned rubbish*, before the pair of us increasingly feral siblings were shoe-horned into the leaky old tent.

Mile after mile of boredom; across the N German plain and up into Jutland... Dutch fields, German fields, Danish fucking fields ... we stopped for a day in Copenhagen - my mother insisting we saw the Tivoli Gardens, but we had no money for the rides etc. then up the coast to the Helsingborg ferry, down the Scanian coast to catch the Lübeck ferry.

By this stage my father confessed that money was a 'bit tight' so we weren't to go near the hot buffet ...  I was so, so hungry i started silently weeping, shoulders shaking; folk at other tables started to turn and stare at us so I was allowed to get 2 bangers, mash and baked beans as my parents reckoned that would be cheapest ... Back to the table with 5 minutes to boarding giving my father his wallet back... "How much?" "s'free - part of the fare" I engulfed this heavenly, properly cooked food in 2 minutes. It was the highlight of the holiday for me... we had to grind our way back, penniless, ravenous ... I'm amazed they let us back into the country ...  2,700 miles in a fortnight at an average of 28 mph... 😢

*I've mentioned before just how abysmal a cook my mother was? Well on this trip she managed to plumb new depths of culinary disaster... the exploding steak and kidney pie trick she left at home... but boiled spuds with no salt, burnt baked beans, boil in a tin frankfurters came with us because "We can't trust that foreign muck"  Jesus, the rest of us were so fucking hungry we used to bless the late arrivals because on the few occasions we were early my brother and I used to go and stand near where others were cooking whimpering and salivating away, tears in our eyes hoping they would take pity on us and feed us a few scraps.  My father would come and haul us back lying through his teeth that "Food was ready"