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The Perfect Amount of Adventure: Passports are durable, Mentos are not

I made it to Germany just fine; the usual lineups and frustrations, but nothing too bad. I got in during the morning and checked into the hotel. I napped until about 4:00 PM, went to grocery store for supplies, and to get dinner. After dinner, I checked email and such, then decided to go out for a walk. I’m trying to keep more active, and I figured some exercise might help me to get to sleep at a decent hour.

I’ve become somewhat familiar with the paths around Filderstadt, so I didn’t hesitate to walk out through the orchards and into the forest that I have blogged about previously. About 20 minutes in, the sky started to darken and nasty clouds started to form. The air cooled and it felt good to be enjoying the freedom, the calm and the peacefulness of the forest after being confined to airports and airplanes for the long journey here.

Every time I’ve done this walk, it has always been an out-and-back route, always the safest, as far as not getting lost. Sure enough, not long after I’d reached the point where I decided to turn around, it started to downpour. It was fairly light rain at first, but with scary lightning and thunder so loud it made me jolt. I could feel the impact so deeply it was really rather terrifying.

The German’s don’t seem to be too big on air conditioning and for some reason or another, probably due to how fat I am, I really can’t take heat. I especially find it difficult to sleep in the heat. Add this to difficultly of trying to adjust my bodily clock and it’s real trouble. Fortunately, the windows in the hotel room are big and they open completely. I’m talking really completely—like I could easily jump out if I felt like it. I, of course, take advantage of this. Not the jumping out, just the airflow.

As I walked through the dense part of the forest, the sudden darken imparted by the declining sun and the encompassing thundering clouds was quite creepy. I could still see the path, but my visibility through the trees was limited. Also, it was around this point that I remembered that my laptop was lying on the bed, beside the above described giant, completely open windows. Oh oh, maybe I ought to run.

And so it began. As I began to run, the rain started to intensify. It started coming down so hard that I couldn’t see very well. In spite of the protection offered by my glasses, the rain penetrated my eyes, causing them to blink rapidly, and my eyelids wanted to close to protect my eyes from the onslaught. The big raindrops pounded against my body like hail, and the wind threatened to blow me off course. My entire body became as soaked as if I stood in the shower, fully clothed, for an hour. In fact, the sheer pressure and volume of water that was let down upon me would be to compare the water coming out of my clogged aquarium pump to a firehose. My body felt heavy, especially my soaked feet. Every step caused water to evacuate from my shoes like a pump. The stom became as fierce as anything I’d ever seen in my life, and it made me wonder if there was some reason Germany received worse storms than back home.

In spite of the tremendous effort that it took to run, I was driven by the worry of the rain entering my hotel room, and damaging my laptop. When I made it back into the town, it didn’t get any easier going. The rain was completely saturating the roads, at the sides the depth reached right up 5 inches or so to the curb. I didn’t see a single other person and only two or three cars. Finally, when I got under the canopy in front of the hotel, I tried to ring out my shirt and shorts as much as possible, then I wiped the soles of my shoes on the mat. I walked briskly through the lobby as many people began to stare. I wanted to sprint up the stairs, but my grip was too slippery.

Fortunately, when I got into my room I found that my computer was fine. The heavy blinds were keeping most of the wind driven rain out, although the carpet was damp right to the bed. I tore off my clothes and draped them over the walls of the shower stall. Everything in my pockets was completely soaked. The heavy paper in my passport would be fine. The wrapper of the Mentos candy however had disintegrated, leaving melting soggy candies to be fished out of my pocket.

As I dried off, I thought back to an interview I saw with a guy who did mountain climbing and artic expeditions. During a discussion about why he wanted to risk his life doing such things, he stated that when embarking on a trip, he always wanted to have enough challenge that it was an adventure, but not too much of an adventure, he said, with a strange smile on his face, eluding to all the terrible things that could go wrong.

Well, I am exhausted, but I didn’t get hit by lighting, eaten by a bear in the forest or slip and fall, and my laptop is fine. I think tonight was the perfect amount of adventure. Thanks Mother Nature, I will sleep well, even though my wet hair is causing my pillow to smell like “wet dog”.

posted by foran  # 12:40 PM