I just jumped off a mountain

Exploring a renewed infatuation with Germany

The longer you live in a place, the easier it is to see the warts.

In my adult life, I never lived any place longer than two years before I started getting the itch to leave. Chicago, Cleveland twice (the beginning and end of where LeBron and I overlap), and Düsseldorf.

As a result, I never lived anywhere consistently for longer than three years in my adult life. Even stranger, I can viscerally recall the feeling I had in Chicago, yearning to move to Cleveland. And I can viscerally recall sitting in a coffee shop on East Fourth Street in downtown Cleveland a few years later, realizing I wasn’t happy there either.

Düsseldorf was different. The urge to move on wasn’t as palpable as the others. Ever since college, I’ve felt a sense that I might be happier living in Europe––and I’d yet to even visit the continent. So when it felt like it might be time to leave Düsseldorf, it didn’t hit me nearly as hard as it had in Chicago or Cleveland. This time, it felt like I was close to scratching the itch, I just needed to move a little to the right.

That happened to be Berlin.

Four years ago today, I was wrapping things up at work in Düsseldorf and planning our move across the country to the Hauptstadt. Now it’s been a whopping seven years since we first made the move to Germany. So plenty long enough to have found the warts, or rather, Warzen.

(The wart community will be pleased to know that Warzen aren’t used disparagingly like in English. Instead, they just say, “Mit allen Fehlern und Schwächen.” That is, more directly, “with all faults and weaknesses.”)

Natürlich––of course there are days when I look outside my Prenzlauer Berg window and see the sun setting at 3:30 p.m. into the depths of winter and think to myself, “Is this really my happy place?” And I’m sure that feeling will return in, say, four months. I’m familiar with the feeling. It’s the one that convinced me to plan all of my trips outside of Germany.

But we did have one trip planned this summer within Germany that, despite my relative disinterest in travel within the country, I’d long to visit. A couple weeks ago, we took the train down to Munich and connected over to Allgäu––a cultural region you’ve probably never heard of within a slice of Deutschland you have heard of, Bavaria.

Per usual, it was a trail race that finally pulled us down to this region of southern Germany. About a month before the trip, we decided to extend our stay for a few more days. I even took vacation days to stay within Germany, something I hadn’t done since… I haven’t a clue.

And I gotta say, it was one of my favorite trips in recent memory. The town hosting the race wasn’t the spectacular mountain village simmering in my imagination, but the race was great, the nature was stunning, the food was delicious, and the beer was pretty phenomenal. Coupled with our extension down to Obertsdorf, a stone’s throw from the Austrian border, where I whiled a sunny afternoon away paddling on a forest lake, went paragliding for the first time, and ran into my very first Waldfest, I left with a reinvigorated infatuation for my life in Germany with Berlin as our home base.

The love fest continued the following week when a work retreat pulled me back into Bavaria, this time for an overnight stay in a mountain hut accessible only by foot. This, to paint a little bit of a picture, was a refined mountain hut experience with some of the best food I’d had in a long time, all cooked using ingredients from the surrounding area where you’re surrounded by the clanging of cowbells. This, I remember thinking after a bite of Kuchen I absolutely didn’t need, is what German food really is and can be at its best.

As a believer that food is the best way to someone’s heart, the excursion naturally left me swooning even more. And it was at some point on that train ride back to Berlin that I realized I’d blown by that typical two-year mark when I start to get a little itchy. Not only had I blown by it, I was giddy to get back home to our humble abode, envelope myself in the resplendence of Berlin, and plan the next jaunt around our new(-ish) national backayrd.

Should You Be Using Quail Eggs in Your Morning Omelet?

Though I’ve had pieces written for Trail Runner that were republished at Outside Magazine, this is my first written exclusively for the pub. It felt like a milestone of sorts. I remember being in that same Cleveland coffee shop I mentioned earlier, applying for a job with Outside. It was hardly the first time I tried to work with them. So to finally get the job done felt, well, like a milestone in my writing career.

Read the full story here