Drifting on Purpose: From the Palatinate to the Black Forest

We are back on the road again. Not with a dramatic departure, not with a big plan pinned to the wall, but with the quieter kind of restart that feels like exhaling. This time we are taking it noticeably slower, and honestly, it suits us.

First stop: the Palatinate, for my mother’s birthday

Our first break was in the Pfalz (the Palatinate), because birthdays are the kind of landmark you do not want to rush past. We stayed for the celebration, and then we stayed a few days longer. Those extra days had a softness to them. Familiar streets. Familiar voices. The kind of comfort you cannot plan for on a route map.

Two messages, two reunions, decades in between

An Instagram post did what it sometimes does and opened two small doors. Two friends reached out independently, and suddenly our week had a different shape.

I have known both of them for a long time, just from very different chapters of my life. One from school, back in the middle school years somewhere mid 80s. The other from my time in the military service in 1992. That is the strange magic of old friendships: you can go thirty or forty years without sharing everyday life, and still, the moment you sit down together, some part of you remembers how to speak the same language.

We spent one days each visiting them. No big agenda. Just talking, laughing, filling in the missing pages. It felt grounding. Also a little surreal, in the best way.

It is easy, when you live on wheels, to let time become a blur of places. These two days did the opposite. They made time feel like something sharp, something you can hold again.

Into the Black Forest, for a “lost place”

We added a spare day and spent it in Freudenstadt, in a spa and sauna. Not as a reward, not as a luxury flex, just as a gentle way to fill a waiting day without turning it into a problem to solve. A waiting day was necessary, because the visit to this lost place was only possible on Wednesday. We know not everyone has the time or access for that kind of one-day-pause, and we do not take it for granted. For us, it was a reminder that not every gap needs to be “used” for productivity. Sometimes it can simply be lived.

And then Wednesday came. Close your eyes and breathe in. Dust, old wood, traces of perfume that faded a century ago. Run your fingers along the handrail where kings once rested their fingers. Feel the cold of plaster that remembers warmer days.

Hotel Waldlust, Freudenstadt. Born 1902. A grand dame of the Black Forest who danced with royalty and movie stars through the roaring twenties. She closed her eyes in 2005.

Stand in the ballroom. Listen. If you are quiet enough, you can hear the echo of a jazz band, the rustle of silk, laughter drifting through corridors that have not seen light in twenty years.

As we walked through the building, room by room, it did not feel like ticking off a “spot.” The guide’s words gave shape to the silence, and the building did what old places do best: it made us slow down without asking.

The kind of week that looks empty, but is not

If you measure travel in distance, this week looks like “not much.” A birthday. Two visits. A waiting day. A spa afternoon. A guided tour that required patience.

But if you measure travel in what changed inside you, it was full.

There is a quiet lesson here that does not belong only to road life. Most of us, whether we travel or not, have a habit of treating “in-between time” like a mistake. Waiting becomes something to fix. Slowness becomes something to justify. And yet, some of the best moments arrive precisely when we stop trying to force the day into a shape it does not want.

This week, we let the week be a week, and a reminder that drifting can be a valid way of moving through life, even if you are not moving very far.

Explore. Dream. Discover.