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Campsites are delimited areas set off for overnight stays, usually outside cities or small towns, often in the vicinity of beaches or other recreation grounds, where in exchange for payment travellers can spend the night in their own tents or caravans. Other than the small pitch of a few square metres that the owners of the tent or caravan has at their disposal for as long as they have paid for, the campsite also offers visitors certain common facilities, such as toilets, showers, a kiosk where basic necessities are sold, often a playground for the children, and if it is well appointed, a swimming pool. The campsite is akin to the hotel, which is also a place where travellers spend the night, but while the hotel demands that one relinquishes one's own habitual existence and for a few hours lives one's life in an unfamiliar room, which over the years has been occupied by hundreds or thousands of people who have all subordinated themselves to its four walls and for a few hours allowed themselves to be framed by their unfamiliarity, the campsite accommodates travellers’ desire for independence by allowing them to erect their own homes and thus to establish an intimate, homely zone amid the unfamiliar. One might think that this possibility of remaining independent would be considered superior to the lack of independence of the hotel, that in our so-called individualistic age we would value the freedom of the campsite more than the constraints of the hotel, but that's not how it is, the campsite has a low status, and it has been decreasing for several decades. The reason is a simple but hidden and perhaps even deliberately concealed fact: money and freedom are opposing entities. The diminishing status of the campsite has coincided with the rise of market liberalism and privatisation, and money establishes differences between things, it grades and demarcates in a system that restricts access to the world and in which whatever cannot be assigned monetary value is relegated to the outside, so that openness is directly linked with worthlessness. The freedom of the wanderer, the person who goes wherever he wants and sleeps where he happens to find himself, now exists only among the homeless, who occupy the lowest rung of society's ladder, while driving around from place to place carrying one's own dwelling and one's own food, which in one sense opens up the world and retains a remnant of the freedom of the wanderer, isn't considered enviable either. Just think of the Roma people and their status in society. Thus there is a scale, from the homeless person who sleeps on benches and in gateways, in parks and woods on the outskirts of cities, to the person who lives in an enormous apartment or house, secured with alarms and by guards at the entrance. It is therefore unthinkable that a man like the Norwegian billionaire businessman Kjell Inge Røkke, who comes from a working-class family but is now one of the richest men in the country, would spend his holidays in a caravan, even though he may have done so with his family when he was growing up and thus knows well the smell of dewy tent canvas in the evening and the safe but also exciting feeling of falling asleep to the sound of low voices from outside other tents, where women and men are sitting in their camping chairs, chatting in the gathering darkness of the summer night. The joy of being on the road, for the next day the tent will be dismantled, the luggage will be stowed away in the boot, you will head on to the next campsite, where you never know what you will find: will there be a pool? Will they sell soft ice cream? Will there be other children the same age as you? Will there be trampolines? Is it by the sea, with a sandy beach? Is it by a river, is it near the forest, in the mountains, next to a field where bellicose bulls are grazing? I still remember the excitement of family camping trips in my childhood, in the 1970s when camping was the most common form of holidaymaking and one could see heavily loaded cars lined along the roads next to unfolded camping tables and cooler bags, in an age when it wasn't yet considered shameful to bring your own home-cooked food (which stands in the same relation to the restaurant as the tent does to the hotel) simply because people then had less money. Campsites still exist, but since people have more money now, the logical thing has happened: slowly the mobile tents and caravans became less and less mobile, gardens sprang up around them, they became filled with conveniences and knick-knacks, TVs and computers, refrigerators and dryers, and became more and more like ordinary homes, into which their transformation has now become complete, so that campsites are now places where people live half the year, fenced in and enclosed and immobile, and the only things which remind one of displacement and mobility are the wheels of the huge caravans, which no longer bring freedom but are merely symbols of freedom. These campsites embody a sort of congealed longing, not unlike the posture of the poet in his tower writing about the open and the free.