Two days ago I sped on down to Albuquerque, jumped on a jet and flew at a speed of hundreds of miles per hour for hour after hour, then got into my rental car and hit the autobahn for a 140+ kilometer per hour dash into Bavaria before a lunch stop in a town I called home many years ago. I was running on adrenaline by that point having been up and traveling for the previous 20 hours or so. I parked the car and started to wander cobblestone streets that I knew like the back-of-my-hand more than 35 years ago. The place seemed way bigger than I remembered, as if extra, scenic streets had been squeezed in to the compact downtown. None-the-less, my heart and mind slowed down considerably from the pace of the last day on the road. I stopped into a bakery I used to frequent in my old neighborhood to pick up a sandwich for lunch -- it had seemed to change very little. The counter person rattled off several quick phrases in German that I didn’t catch and I instinctively replied, “Langsam, bitte.” “Slower, please” was one of the first snippets of German that I had ever learned, and it always served me well.
The rest of my day slowed down considerably as I took a slow cruise through the Franconian countryside … through villages I had walked to, visited, and had great times many years ago. This was kind of the European version of traveling the “blue line” roads. More about that later. I reached my first base, Behringersmühle, in the early evening and was greeted by my hosts, Renate and Dietmer. By that time I was definitely moving slow … body and brain … I slipped into a deep sleep, ready to down-shift even further.
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