The slowest roadtrip in the world

Me, having made it after only 23 stops.

I’ve recently completed my first season at my new opera house. Having started in May, it was obviously not a full season but it was still a lot to take in - the move, the new job, adjustments in private life. As much as I was looking forward to the free time I was now facing until we resume in three weeks, I was also hesitant because my new routines were falling away for a little while.

I knew I wanted to take some time away from everything because that’s the only way I can truly relax. I’m too fidgety around home, seeing chores and potential improvements around me even when I don’t feel like it’s necessary or desirable to work on them right now. The trope with ADD where you walk into the kitchen with the intention to cook and instead somehow miraculously end up fixing the curtain rod and making a mess instead - that’s certainly true for me. The dishes on my counter top that I don’t even see right now (but I know they’re there) still stress me.

Being new to the North, there’s obviously a ton of things you can do for vacation to get to know the land better. Having the ocean so close by all of a sudden feels like a massive temptation, for example. But I was undecided still and the first few days after the season ended were really just dedicated to catching up with everything that had happened in such a short time. This came with quite a bit of anxiety - kind of like when you spontaneously decide to walk across a very narrow ledge and only after the fact do you look back and realize what you’ve just done, and that’s when the hormones kick.

In this moment of processing, I had one of those ideas. A lot of great things in my life have started with ‘What if I just …?’. Like, ‘What if I just build my own house?’, or ‘What if I just ask if I can work here?’ This time, it was: ‘What if I just drive my car up here?’ - which sounds benign enough, except that my car is a Renault Twizy electric car with a range of 60 km at best and around 35 km realistically if you’re outside of town. It’s around 730 km from my home town to Hamburg on the back roads so … all the more reason to do it.

Somewhere in Northern Germany, about to get Thai street food and call it a day

I sat with this idea for a few days, did a few calculations to figure out roughly how long it would take me, and then I just booked a train ticket to my home town and off I went. I had a screenshot map of the general itinerary and I knew what my first stop of the day was going to be, and that was it. No booked accommodations, no nothing.

Here’s what you need to know about the Twizy. It’s not even officially a car. It’s a quad. It doesn’t have a rearview mirror (the back is closed). It seats two (behind one another) but it’s either the other person or a bag, not both. Side windows are optional, and while I have them, they are a pain to get in and out and they don’t fully close off the interior so whichever temperature you have outside, you also have it inside - except in the summer, where, if you leave the windows in, you will be grilled. There is no ventilation, no air-conditioning, no board computer, no cushioned seats or adjustable anything. It’s a little plastic box on wheels that makes 80 km/h if you don’t mind the steering wheel shaking - and if you crash or someone crashes you, you’re toast. I love it. (Not the last part, but just about everything else.)

Proud moment - first charge in Hamburg after crossing the country

Originally, the Twizy was used in the family by my Mom and I took it over a few years ago. It’s shorter than a Smart so if there’s any parking space out there, you will be able to squeeze into it. Also, it charges on 230 V so you can use your own power outlet at home, just like that. The battery is 6 kWh which makes it roughly three fifty per one hundred kilometers. That’s about as cheap as solo transport is going to get. Just one of the things I told myself to compensate for the fact that I have to scratch off ice on the inside of the windshield in winter and that condensation on the plastic windows is horrible in the morning most seasons. I keep a thick blanket in the car year round to keep warm and there were times when the gas pedal froze to a certain spot so I had to lift it with my toes to stop. I’d also like to add that I actively lift my spine up from the back rest before I encounter any type of train tracks or pothole because there is no such thing as a shock absorber. Oh, and the wiper only cleans, like, 30 percent of the windshield at best so driving in the rain is … extra. Also since, even with the windows in, rain will come inside. There are drain holes in the floor is all I’mma say.

Here’s the flip side though. This car is the most inexpensive and maintenance-free complex machine I’ve ever owned. It has no extras so nothing ever breaks (except the windshield heating, which sometimes switches on and off randomly). Driving is never stressful because any type of lane is more than broad enough, even with cyclists coming into the picture. It has decent acceleration. It’s quirky. And outside of a bunch of kids throwing their disposable vapes through the hole in the back, no one ever tried to steal it, key it or break into it - but a lot of people do come up to me and are somewhat fascinated. It’s not for everyone but, in my personal opinion, the Twizy rocks.

Hotel let me charge in their garage - but the fuses were for e-bike batteries so the power went out. Oops.

When I came to Hamburg I knew that I wasn’t going to need a car to get to work, and after having driven here a few times, I also don’t recommend the city traffic. It’s very telling that the shortest distance of my trip, 22 km for the final leg of the journey, took me by far the longest because it led me through the city center. A whole five-lane mess. I’m still not a fan. But I live a little further out and what I did notice the last two months is that due to how I grew up, being in the car around the place I live in gives me an extra feeling of being home. A friend of mine has taken me on a few drives since I arrived and every time, I have felt more local. Plus, some things like trips to the hardware store simply don’t make sense on the bus. (First thing I bought this week when I came back with my car was 25 kg of pebbles.)

So I knew that bringing my weird car here was going to be an accomplishment in this whole arrival process, and with that in mind I set out on the slowest road trip anyone I know has ever dared to take. Here’s how it worked. Every leg was around 30-35 km, sometimes a little below, sometimes a little above, depending on availability of public charging stations. Yes, I can charge on a normal socket but realistically, unless you want to beg at people’s doorstep (not my thing), it’s a lot easier to use the network we got, and it’s actually pretty good. Whenever I arrived somewhere, I planned the next trip, looking a little farther ahead so I wouldn’t end up in no man’s land eventually, but never really knowing how far I’d make it by the end of the day.

The most eclectic assembly of facades I’ve ever seen - Alfeld (Leine).

Each charging cycle was around one and a half hours, sometimes a little longer. I was conservative with the travel distance to make sure that if the charging station I was going for was broken, I would still be able to make it somewhere else. I almost got in trouble once because I was so far out but then the friendly manager of a golf club let me charge at their normal outlet. Other than that, it always worked out. I was using Plugsurfing (not sponsored) to find chargers, which ended up costing a little bit more than the local tariffs if you’re signed up with the respective Stadwerke but I took it - it was just easier. Overall, I didn’t spend much more than 40 bucks on the whole journey (obviously without accommodation). That’s impossible to beat.

In total, and to my surprise, I was only on the road for six days. I quickly settled into certain routines (and I’m not talking about the self-talk in the car). I would do four legs most days, sometimes five. Drive for half an hour, charge and do something in the meantime (finding a toilet, a lot of the times), drive again, charge again. Eventually decide it’s enough for the day, drive up to a small country hotel and ask for a room. Eat out, sleep, have breakfast, start the whole process all over again. It was very comforting to strip life down to those basics - food, water, shelter. I would take small hikes while charging, sit in a café, take walks around town, play some games on my portable console, whatever I felt like. I didn’t choose settlements by their attractions, I just went and looked at what was there. Sometimes, literally nothing. Sometimes, a whole lot of surprises.

I guess it’s for forest bathing or somethin’. Seen in Dallau.

You notice a lot of things on a trip like this, off the highway. You notice the landscape changing. From the hilly fields of Mid-Germany to the flatlands of the North. The curvy roads around Kassel, the long straight lines under the foliage close to Lüneburg. You hear different dialects every time you sneak into an Edeka or a Rossmann to pee. You realize how big the country actually is, and how small. You see how many people live in the countryside somewhere, just like how I grew up, and how much of a bubble the city really is. I’ve never gotten a fuller picture of my home country, and if you look at the map of my trip, I haven’t even touched half of the regions.

I had great food along the way. Got overtaken by the fire fighters and my windows weren’t in and it was so loud that I had to scream to shut my ears off. I once accidentally left my door slightly open (they open upwards, not sideways - think Lamborghini) and wondered for the longest time why my side mirror was pointing upwards while driving. On a stormy day, I had to physically hold my window shut with one hand because it was pushed out. And I’ll never again overtake a truck while slipstreaming another truck - I was trapped on the wrong lane for a few seconds under oncoming traffic and it was fucking terrifying. I will also say that with a car as mine, the biggest threat are other people underestimating my speed. I’ve been in countless situations over the years where people felt the insatiable urge to overtake me simply because my car seemed so small, and then realized while next to me that I was actually driving as fast as they were, and that resulted in a lot of them nearly crashing into vehicles coming at them on the other side.

Despite the dangers of the road, the driving was pretty smooth most of the time, and I got to enjoy the landscape around me, the yellow stubble fields and the leafy summer forests, the red kites in the sky and the deer in the fields. I had no music on most of the time (it is impossible to hear much through the headwind if you’re going faster than 50 km/h) so it was just me, a lot of empty roads and the occasional smell of manure around the farms. The simplicity of it was calming me very effectively.

Surprising gem on the way - the Haydau monastery

After six days of having slept in random hotel rooms of various levels of comfort and ridiculousness (one of them had underfloor heating on and it was 25 degrees out and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to turn it off), when I arrived at the town sign for Hamburg, I shed a few tears of pride. The most reasonable approach would have been to pack the Twizy on a trailer and have someone with an appropriate license drive it up here in seven hours. Instead, I was stubborn enough to take the long way round and it was worth it a hundred times over. I walked around a beautiful lake in Göttingen and observed birds for an hour. I found a random Kneipp basin in the woods in Dallau and treaded water. Ate fries in the public pools in Southern Germany after a truck driver and I had made a lock pick for my own charging adapter because I had forgotten the keys at home (it worked). Saw my oldest friend and her baby daughter on the way. Randomly landed in the Schnitzel capital of Europe but never ate a Schnitzel there. Accidentally broke into a graveyard chapel. It was just a lot of fine little moments to remember while all my stuff (mostly dirty laundry) was sitting in a small suitcase and a duffel bag on the back seat and my Twizy was happily charging away in one of those small towns.

golf course to the rescue

There’s been a social media trend recently where videos of people doing outlandish but cool things are captioned with ‘when you discover you have free will’. It is a little bit like that for me. There’s a whole lof of ‘why not’ happening inside my brain lately and I’m certainly emboldened by the way my new life is playing out. Why not move across the country and completely start over? Why not drive the most unsuitable car across the length of Germany in thirty-minute sections? If that’s you out there, having a crazy idea right now, effin’ go for it, please. It’s so worth it.

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