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Heidelberg and the Art of the Detour
Low expectations make for great trips
There’s magic in the places you don’t mean to go.
It’s not so much the road less traveled; Heidelberg, Germany’s 51st largest city, is no backwater. After all, this is still the home of one of the oldest and most prestigious universities in all of Europe, a kind of German Oxford or Harvard that produced minds of the caliber of Max Weber, Hannah Arendt, Robert Schumann, W. Somerset Maugham, and Demetri Mendeleev.
But it was never our goal to get here. In fact, we weren’t planning on visiting Germany at all.
True, we needed to get to Freiburg to return the camper van we had rented in Toulouse. But our goal was a tour of the Christmas markets of Alsace, Strasbourg and Colmar, and all the other beautiful medieval towns in that part of France.
But we had time on our hands. And we had a camper van, rented to us for €99 for a week’s use, so long as we dropped it off where the company needed it on the day we said we would.
We’re normally planners. Lately, though, we’ve been taking a more improvisational approach to our trips. When you have a home on wheels, you can be flexible.
