Camp-let ready to face the freezing winter weather once again
Trailer tent teams from no fewer than five different countries have signed up to take part in Camp-let’s Winter Challenge in Achensee in Austria. If you bring enough heaters with you, the Danish trailer tent is fine for a skiing holiday in the Alps.
There was an awful lot of head shaking last year when Camp-let accepted the challenge set by Tarup Campingcenter on Funen, Denmark, and embarked on a skiing holiday to Italy with a trailer tent on its tow bar. The trailer coped well with both the snow and the frost, so this time the South Jutland trailer tent factory has its sights set on the Austrian Alps.
“Our skiing holiday struck a responsive chord in several of the other countries where we sell Camp-let, and the retailers were enthusiastic. It was a pretty chilly experience, and I distinctly remember promising myself that it would be the first and last of its kind. But now we have been challenged to make another trip, and so there is no way round it,” says Camp-let’s 28-year-old director Hans Jørn Nissen.
Naturally, he will be pulling on his ski clothes and has talked his friend, Rasmus Bergholt, into making up the second half of the Danish team in the Camp-let Winter Challenge. They will be competing against similar teams from Germany, Luxembourg, Slovenia and Holland in these unofficial European championships for trailer tent nutcases. Holland is actually sending four participants as the Dutch Camp-let importer has chosen to send employees from the workshop as well as the sales team as a way of using the trip as a teambuilding exercise.
The trip will last from Wednesday 3 February to Sunday 7 February, and the destination is Achensee in the Austrian Alps.
“As I say, last year’s ski trip was a chilly experience with temperatures of minus 18°C outside. But we can draw on the lessons we learned from our experiences last year for this year’s trip: We will definitely be bringing a powerful percussion drill, so we can get the pegs into the frozen ground, and we’ll be leaving behind the latex mattresses which, in the summer, transform a Camp-let into a heavenly place to sleep. You see, Latex freezes at temperatures below minus 10 degrees, so you feel like you are sleeping on top of a door!” explains Nissen.
Each Camp-let team will be bringing a 2 kWh electric heating stove and two petroleum stoves of a similar size. This corresponds to what you would need to heat an entire single family house in Denmark.
“We had something similar last year, but it wasn’t much use. The power outlets at the campsite we were staying at were only 800 watt, and our gas heater didn’t work properly in the freezing conditions either. So now we’re going to give petroleum a go, and make sure that the campsite in Achensee is able to provide enough power for our electric stoves,” says Nissen.
A Camp-let is approved as a Tempo 100 vehicle in Germany, which means that it can be towed at 100 km/h, and last year they made short work of the German motorways. But only as far as Munich, where they hit a snowstorm and, from then on, the team could only drive at 40 km/h for long stretches.
“The Camp-let managed the trip no problem, and suffered no ill effects from “freezing its butt off” in minus 18 degrees. Like last year, we have borrowed a Kia Ceed from Kia Motors, but it is the new model, which drives even further to the litre, so, yet again, we can prove that Camp-let is an environmentally friendly type of holiday and way cheaper than towing a caravan,” explains Nissen.
