“The Quest for the hidden Europe” – Or a hike by train trough half of Europe

During the summer vacation of 2007 more than 70 youngsters of the Danish organisation FDF are disposed to go on a mission. They are to find a secret that will change the world as we know it. Unfortunately the secret has been lost centuries ago when a brave Monk named “Pascal” was chased through half Europe in his attempt to save the knowledge from dark forces of his time. But the secret keeper left footprints all over Europe at places where he took refuge and our participants were very eager to find them.

We started in Denmark trying to squeeze the entire luggage in the compartments, the first hint was distributed among the participants and their first challenge was to decrypt the information with their code wheel and transform them into coordinates so they would know where the first trip of the journey would end.

And the first station was in Warsaw, Poland.
During the train ride and while we built our first camp, people started to get to know each other and be a bit more sociable since the group consisted of youngsters from 12 different local FDF circles from all over Denmark. But then everybody was driven by curiosity and started to explore the city. Some visited the museum of Warsaw uprising, some went to the Zoo, some did Geocaching and some visited Warsaw’s beautiful old town.

After tree days there was no time to dwell any longer because we found the second hint and the next train lead us to Slovakia, better to say to Bratislava.
The camping spot, which was recommended to us by people from Erko, gave us a big surprise what is to say a beautiful lake and very warm weather. Our participants didn’t even finish putting up their tents before enjoying the first of many dips in it and further we had a cosy camp fire evening.

Bratislava invited us to a photo marathon. This is a very funny activity where you hand out a list of motives the players are supposed to take pictures of and they receive extra points for combining these motives in one picture.
Further more we had the pleasure to see another beautiful city and the Devlin Castle. Hidden in the depth of these walls we came across another footprint of Pascal and even though the excitement about the new puzzle peace was big, we were also sad since this meant that we were yet again on the tracks towards a new place.

The train tracks lead us even further east and into another country and capital. We were going to Budapest in Hungary. On our arrival a group of Hungarian sea scouts welcomed us very warmly and took us on a canoe tour on the Danube.
We stayed in allotment gardens and the people there took very good care of us with Hungarian Goulash and lots of other very tasty dishes. This is Hungarian hospitality.
The sea scouts stayed with us during the evenings where we enjoyed different games and other activities.
But Budapest contains very many sights to visit. The Parliament, Castle, Old Bathes and lots of other things. Yet again after a couple of days our participants became restless. What happened to Pascal and the secret? So once again we packed out tents and backpacks and travelled further southbound towards Milan in Italy.

Milan held many surprises ready for us. Not only was it lovely and warm but also our hosts had more than everything prepared for us.
We stayed close to an Oratorio where they held summer courses for the children of the community. We experienced the agile, full of life and very musical kids and their leaders and fair enough the heat didn’t affect them at all.

While wandering around Milan visiting the Cathedral, the inner city and e.g. the Leonardo da Vinci Museum of science we also had enough time to enjoy the Italian ice cream and get a little rest after being on the road (or better tracks) so long already.
Another highlight was definitely an evening with camp fire entertainment at the central square of Milan right in front of the Cathedral. We didn’t only entertained ourselves but also all the tourists around and some other youth groups on summer trips.
Milan held not only warm weather but also more details about the secret keeper and so our participants found them in the old Castle and we knew the next travel would lead to Germany and a City called Koblenz.

But as we arrived another surprise awaited us there since the valley where the secret keeper was supposed to have travelled through was filled up with tents and people. We had arrived at a Jamboree from different European Scouts organisations and this camp was called “Whisperville”. As the name says already this was a scary camp. We couldn’t exit the valley and were surrounded by a thick and old forest. However Scouts must stick together and so we put up our tents and entered the daily camp life of Whisperville together with people from Norway, Iceland, Slovenia, Germany and Latvia and everybody started to mingle immediately. But what happened to our secret? Did we loose track or couldn’t we find the hints that would lead us to the answer? By accident one of the Scouts from the camp told us that they found an old roman watchtower on top of the hills surrounding us. Could this be the answer to our questions? We had to go and have a look on it. In the security of darkness we climbed up the hill and entered the tower and there it was the last peach of information we needed to decrypt the secret. And the secret was!!!
Well we don’t want to keep all the fun from you therefore try to find it yourself or better make another story up as we did and use it during one of your summer camps.

All in all we had more than a lovely time and we want to thank everybody especially the various contacts in the different countries for their help to organise this trip and their great hospitality.

Magdalena Omlor