Hoting - Backe

Today we have to check out of our house by the lake. So we enjoy one more breakfast with a view of the lake and start the morning at a leisurely pace.

Then everything is packed, cleaned and loaded into the car. Onwards to our next accommodation, in Backe. On the way we go shopping and fill up the tank. At first we can hardly find our Airbnb, as it doesn’t show up directly on Google Maps. It is a small house in a rural area that we will have all to ourselves for the next two days. It is our cheapest accommodation so far, but it still offers everything we need and is less than 100m from the nearest lake. The key is hanging outside and the door is open, so check-in is accordingly easy and simple. We bring the luggage into the house and want to see a sight nearby: the Finnfors, a hike that is supposed to lead past old settlements in the forest.

About 50 minutes and quite a few lonely kilometres on a dusty gravel road full of potholes later, we arrive at something that looks like a kind of car park. Of course we are once again the only people there, even though it is a Sunday. There we lace up our hiking boots and the path leads into the forest. It is a circular hike that passes various points marked on a small map. Shortly after we reach the first point, however, we hear a deep growl. The growl repeats and gets louder the deeper we go into the forest. We take the animal making the noise for a bear and decide to slowly turn back. As we move away, the growl gets quieter. So we walk back to our car and wonder whether it really was a bear.

Next we head back to the Airbnb, where a finished load of laundry is already waiting for us, which we hang up. Then we go to the lake and read there in the grass. Later we do our daily workout and start cooking. There is curry rice with fruit and salad. After our evening research we find out that the growling animal could also have been a badger that felt threatened and was about to attack. Whether it was a bear or an angry badger, it was definitely a good thing that we didn’t walk any further towards the growling.