Romantic Road

We had a painful tradition when I was a kid. Every fall, as the canvas of the countryside was painted with reds and oranges and yellows, my two sisters and I would be coaxed into the family station wagon for a drive through the fields of Minnesota and into neighboring Wisconsin. The goal: see the leaves. Now to a kid, this trek was about as highly anticipated as Boxing Day. It was about as exciting as oatmeal. We would reluctantly get in, inhaling the fresh fair air deeply, knowing it was our last breath of non-recycled air for a few hours. As the asphalt passed beneath our car we would get restless. “Where are we going? Why? This is boring.” It seemed to us that all of this could be done while taking a trip to the mall or watching Nova for a few minutes on PBS. We eventually made one crisp, beautiful fall day so painful for our parents that it was the last of its kind. No more leaves, no more drives, it just wasn’t worth it.

With some years’ reflection, I guess unknowingly I matured. My appreciation for nature’s beauty is many times what it once was and I now realize that the memories from this trip that linger most vividly in my mind or those of vistas, views and scenes unlike any I’ve ever seen. With this wisdom, although a small bit of it, I have come to seek out the beauty of these ‘leaf drives’ in all of nature. So, naturally, when we were given the option to take a drive connecting Munich with Rothenberg, Germany on the so-called “Romantic Road,” I jumped at the opportunity. (I’m sorry, mom and dad, that I was a late bloomer in my appreciation, you endured too many hours of childish complaining from my unrefined little mouth.) This trip, however, was incredible. The ‘Romantic Road’ is actually more simply a route, connecting Munich with Frankfurt via several of the still intact medieval cities of Deutschland. The closer we got to our final destination, Rothenburg, the more picturesque the cities became. While my ten-year-old self would have complained every minute, this drive was one of the most amazing my 25-year-old self has seen. Every ditch of every mile of this trip was lined with flaming orange, red and yellow. The color was everywhere, it seemed we had showed up for the last moments of nature’s season changing finale. There have been a few times on this trip where my senses have literally felt overwhelmed. I felt as though there was too much beauty to capture, I felt like telling the bus driver to pull over, I needed more time to drink it in. So maybe today, when you’re stopped at a red light or hustling into the grocery store or waiting in line for your caramel macchiato, just take a second to see it all, pull over to the side of life’s road and drink it in because this small window, as God changes our world from green to yellow to orange to red, will soon be closed and you’ll have let yet another ‘leaf drive’ pass you by.