The water at the caravan pitches will be reconnected. The canteen, which is stored in the winter as a kit, is being rebuilt and the last bit of winter in the sanitary building is swept outside. Camping de Mosterdpot in Woudrichem has awakened again this weekend, after a mainly soaking wet winter. “In the autumn everything has to be removed from the camping site because we are in the floodplains and everything will be flooded. In the spring we have to rebuild everything. We can go again.”
The regular guests of camping De Mosterdport in Woudrichem have a love and hate relationship with water. “Every winter it gets flooded here, then it’s soaking here.” The Boven-Merwede literally flows in front of the campsite, the river that floods the campsite every winter.
“It also has its charm,” says Anja. “Year in, year out, the start and end of the camping season is wrong. The site has to be emptied on 1 October because the risk of flooding is very high, but from 1 April you can stay overnight at the campsite again.” In the weeks leading up to the first of April, a large team of volunteers was also busy this weekend to prepare the campsite for the new summer season. “It is also the period that people see each other again after six months,” says Jessica de Snoo from Rotterdam. “That also makes it cozy here.”
Dion van der Pluijm, who has been on the Mustardpot for 20 years, can confirm this. “I’m from Hank, a village 15 kilometers away, and I’m really enjoying it here. If I could, I’d like to crawl into my caravan now, but it’s still in the garage. Just a little while, we’ll go first build everything.” The most important building of the campsite is probably the pavilion. It is the canteen that was reassembled last weekend, as a kind of kit.
Unlike many other Brabant campsites, De Mosterdpot campsite is an association. The members are on the camping site and the board takes care of the day-to-day business. Investors therefore have no chance of buying the campsite and then filling it with chalets. “Fortunately, the latter would not and never be possible,” says a camping guest. “Because nothing is allowed on the camping site in the autumn. Certainly no permanent chalets. So we are and remain an old-fashioned cozy family campsite, which occasionally gets flooded.”
Last summer the water came too, unexpectedly and quickly. The cause was the enormous tidal wave, after days of rainfall, from Belgium, Germany and Limburg. “We had to get out of here from one moment to the next,” says Dion. “There would be a meter of water on the campsite.” The camp was quickly evacuated.
“That was not a success, rather not anymore”, says Anja, who is looking forward very positively to the coming season. “We are going for bingo again, hopefully we will have corona behind us. Everything will be fine again this year.”
Camping De Musterdpot is 60 years old this year.
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