valerie goes places / part 4

hello my name is valerie and i like to go places

in this 4th episode of "valerie goes places" i will talk about my biggest and most awesomest roadtrip that i've done in my whole 19 years of living

to start off, there is some context needed on how the trip first even happened. when i came into school, me and two other people became really huge friends inside of a bigger friend group and we all decided to start a minecraft server, just building random things and having fun together in a normal minecraft world :D

the city that we started at is called elchingen. after a few months of just playing normally and keeping the name we asked ourselves "what if theres an elchingen in germany?" and thats when we finally searched it up and realized: yes there is.

right after that, we instantly planned a roadtrip to go to elchingen and later decided to combine it with camping outside in nature so now we come to the more interesting part of this blog post.


:: the first day ::

the first day was already kinda wild.
the route we took was from our home city of leipzig to bayreuth, since we had a passenger going from leipzig to bayreuth for that extra bit of money. after we ended up there, we took a small break and then drove 4 hours to elchingen, where we stayed sadly only for a couple minutes to take funny photos but then we drove off again since we had some other stuff planned that day and it was already pretty late.

at about 8pm we arrived in stuttgart, the capital of baden-württemberg where one of the people we were with (the driver) was from. we took the stadtbahn for a couple stops, had some amazing views along the way and then drank a couple beers (except the driver obv) before deciding we should go find a spot to camp at.

since the driver was very local, he knew a spot we could go to which took us about 30 minutes and at around 12am, we arrived in a small village. we instantly found a nice spot next to a river, prepared our tent, sat out and took pictures and drank a couple more beers before finally going to sleep at about 2am.

:: the second day ::

the second day started off bad for basically everyone in our party. most of the people slept only about 3-4 hours, but we decided to just try and pull it together and leave the places as quickly as possible, in case any locals alerted the police.
before we did that tho, we had a small breakfast with a coffee (i had choco milk since i dont like coffee) and then we swam around in the river for a bit. it was cold but honestly a fucking amazing experience and i kinda miss swimming while im writing this now lol
after we did that, we packed our stuff and left to the car. along the way i finally saw how amazing the village looked, with wineyards basically surrounding us completely and it was honestly amazing.

when we arrived at the car, we realized how amazingly tired we actually were. since i was pretty hyper (i always am for some reason lol) i decided to give my friend the back seat so he could chill a bit better (the backseat of the car we were in is a lot darker and a lot more comfy than the front seat so he could sleep better) while me and the driver sat in the front and listened to music and did other fun stuff :D

after about 4 hours we finally arrived at our last destination, konstanz at lake constance, right at the german-swiss border.
before we actually went on our trip, we did some research on camping laws all over the country aswell as surrounding countries, just to make sure, and we concluded that switzerland is generally the safest place to camp in that was close to our other destinations.

when we arrived in konstanz, we instantly drove through and went to switzerland to check out the place we wanted to stay at. it was a very dense forest with some paths, but they seemed very safe and very inactive, so we said that this will work. after that we, once again, realized how f'n tired we were and just decided to go back to konstanz to get some food and drinks, then drive back to switzerland and just chill at the parking spot we found for the rest of the day.

at about 9pm, we decided we should find a spot thats a bit further away from any roads and paths, so we decided to venture deeper into the forest, basically finding a spot instantly. about an hour later, we set up our tent there and then went to sleep at 11pm.

the decision to sleep in a forest was possibly one of the worser ones, especially considering how dense and how untraveled it was. we quickly realized this, by:

1. me starting to hyperventilate due to space issues in the tent (im pretty tall and i was pushed into 3 corners of the tent, very scary)

2. US HEARING SOUNDS CONSTANTLY (we werent sure what it was, but it def wasnt a human cuz humans would make much more noise, so it was most likely a fox or some other wild animal, they never approached us though)

3. thunderstorms at about 3am

the thunderstorms somehow calmed down my friend tho, and when he finally fell asleep after 5 hours in the tent, i also fell asleep at some random time.

:: the third day ::

by now, we were all really fucked up, we had some courage to keep going and travelling, but at the same time we were fucking exhausted and just wanted to go home.

somehow, the friend we were travelling with was really content into going to a swiss supermarket (ngl i was too so i was ok with it) and getting some swiss francs, so we hit up the closest city to the place we stayed at and went to co-op. honestly a very fun experience, also very interesting as to how cheap everything was even though you constantly hear about switzerland being much more expensive than germany, but i guess that just counts for things germans care about like gas and tolls and whatever.

when we came back to our car, the first thing we saw was probably the worst thing that couldve happened to us, we got a ticket.
since we're from germany and we're used to our street signs, we didn't know that the parking sign we were standing next to aswell as the road markings meant that we are allowed to park there, as long as we use a parking disc.

at that point we were just very exhausted, we were all annoyed at the ticket which ended up kinda breaking us apart a bit. after that entire ordeal we decided to definitely NOT go to switzerland again during the trip and dedicated our future places to germany and germany only.

this resulted in us driving back north to konstanz, where we decided to go to the university to charge up some of our devices and just have some alone time for a bit. when we arrived there, my friends didnt really like it, but i loved the uni a lot. it had this kinda brutalistic view to it and was in the middle of a forest, resulting in a lot of greenery being around the uni. when we went inside, it all looked kinda old-timey, which i also liked a lot, but that was mainly due to construction going on at the uni currently. we scouted out the library, found it pretty quickly and decided to just chill in our own little study booths for a bit where i just listened to music and did my thing while the others either chilled outside and did their own thing or also did the same.

after about 2-3 hours, we all came back together, having recovered from the pain switzerland has caused and we decided to get some alcohol, get wasted and go swim in the lake constance. we all agreed on this pretty quickly, went and did that and at about 9pm we realized "wait, we're in a relatively small city, can we even take public transport to the uni this late?" so we checked and decided it was best to leave because otherwise we wouldve had to walk for hours on streets with no sidewalks.

before all of this, i went around looking at places near the uni to stay and accidentally found an amazing spot. it was in the middle of a forest, about a 10-15 minutes walk from the car, so we decided when we arrived back from lake constance to just sleep in that forest.

that was the night i had my best sleep yet, it was so calming, i had basically the whole tent to myself, i had my blahaj, my blanket and was all cuddled up and basically fell asleep right as the tent was built and we set everything up inside.

:: the last day ::

i woke up at about 9am. i slept a total of 9 hours in the tent, and i was feeling very tired but also very happy to finally go back home to leipzig. we called up our friend who also woke up not too long before i did and he drove to us with the car, where we packed everything inside and decided to hit the roads to finally go back home.

on the way home, we stopped at mcdonalds because i became so hungry i nearly felt dizzy, i was feeling so bad about everything and just so exhausted that i didnt want to interact with my friends too much so i didnt eat breakfast with them, i was just unable to.

there i ate a big mac, some small fries and a mcsundae until i started feeling good and then we went back on the autobahn for the next 4 hours.

the first part of the trip back home was pretty boring. we just sat there, listened to music, i nearly fell asleep at least 20 times while my friend was just concentrating on the road. this lasted for about 2 hours until we arrived back in stuttgart. we took a small break there to fill up some gas, go to the toilet and just chill a bit.

after that, we somehow had some more motivation to just go, the last part of the trip was about 4 hours and honestly, it was probably the most memorable part of the journey.
i guess the realization just hit us all that we're finally going home and we were more hyped than ever, with me and my friend both drinking beer in the car, listening to loud and fast as fuck techno music, then us pulling over at 8pm on some random gas station to play frisbee for a bit, then going back into the car and just driving through the east german states of thuringia and saxony-anhalt until finally arriving back in leipzig.

when i came home, the first thing i did was put my blahaj in the washer, take a shower and then i instantly went to bed and just fell asleep in an instant. i think that day i slept for about 12-13 hours, showing how amazingly exhausted i just was.


either way, the roadtrip was fucking fire. it had its ups and downs, but at the same time it was also an amazing amount of fun and id love to do more roadtrips like that in the future if its possible, maybe even to countries outside of germany like the netherlands or france or denmark or wherever we wanna go. just have a bit of fun with my friends and a car and basically endless possibilities


to everyone who made it this far, thank you for reading, i love you very much and no matter who you are and who you want to be, you are valid and i appreciate you very much :D


xoxo valerie