The Long Way Home Still Counts

The Long Way Home Still Counts

olaf
Roadtrip
0 Comments

The final stretch. From Freiburg northward, straight through familiar names and familiar stress: Karlsruhe, Frankfurt, Bad Hersfeld, Jena, Leipzig, and finally home. The whole A5, then the rest of the route I know by heart. Eight hundred kilometers. Rain forecast. End of school holidays. A long day was guaranteed.

Traffic confirmed it immediately. The autobahn turned into one continuous ribbon of brake lights. Construction zones, accidents, slow-moving columns. Kilometer after kilometer of patient frustration. At some point, patience runs out before fuel does. We changed plans. Turned east, cut through Bavaria. A good decision. Fewer cars, clearer roads, movement again. The rain stayed mostly behind us, visibility improved, and the drive finally started to feel like driving instead of enduring.

By the time Berlin announced itself, there was just relief. Familiar streets, familiar rhythm. Arrival without fireworks.

Looking back, this trip never followed the plan we thought we had. Spain was the idea, the promise, the bright dot on the mental map. And yet, it was France that quietly carried most of the journey, unexpected, varied, sometimes grey, often generous. We learned again that routes matter more than destinations, and that detours are not mistakes but corrections.
We moved between extremes: heat and rain, crowds and emptiness, city noise and valleys where nothing asked for attention. We slept well and badly, paid too much for toll roads and nothing at all for the best views. We negotiated with weather, infrastructure, and our own energy levels. And most of the time, things worked out, not because they were planned well, but because we stayed flexible.

What remains are not the highlights you’d put on a postcard, but smaller moments: a sunset earned by accident, a camera nearly lost, a campsite that existed exactly when it was needed, pasta cooked with whatever was left. The road taught us restraint more than ambition. When to push on, when to stop, and when “good enough” is actually perfect.

In the end, the distance mattered less than the rhythm. Moving, pausing, adapting. The car carried us, the landscape shaped us, and somewhere along the way the trip became complete without ever trying to be.

Statistics

From 20 September to 5 October 2013 we spent 16 days on the road.

We covered 4,414 km, which equals an average of about 340 km per driving day.
The average driving speed comes out at roughly 50–55 km/h.

Route (simplified, chronological)

Berlin → Wiesbaden → Tübingen → Through eastern France → Chamonix → Southbound across the Alps and Rhône valley → Provence vineyards → Nîmes / Montpellier area → Mediterranean coast → Perpignan → Catalonia / Costa Brava → Barcelona (several days) → Northern coast and inland routes → Andorra → Complete crossing of the country → Pyrenees → Mont-Louis → Massif Central → Millau → Burgundy → Dijon / Auxonne → Alsace → Mulhouse → Black Forest edge → Freiburg → Karlsruhe → Frankfurt → Berlin

What the Numbers Don’t Show

We paid too much for toll roads and nothing at all for the best views.
We slept in vineyards, forests, river valleys, campsites that barely qualified, and cities that demanded patience.
We drove through rain, heat, fog, and one final, exhausting return day defined entirely by brake lights.

Final Takeaway

This trip worked because it kept changing.
Mountains to coast, cities to emptiness, planning to improvisation.
Nothing felt rushed, even on the long days.
Nothing felt wasted, even the wrong turns.
4,414 kilometers later, the car was tired, we were tired, and the trip ended exactly when it should have.
That’s usually how you know it was a good one.