My Wanderlust

The longing for distance begins early, or it doesn’t begin at all. Mine started on a Baltic island called Alsen in 1956, when my father bought his first car—a VW Beetle—and decided his four children would know more of the world than our farming village in Schleswig-Holstein could show them.

He was a schoolteacher, first-born son of a farmer who had broken with tradition to pursue education. Perhaps that’s why he understood that real learning happened beyond classroom walls. Every summer for six weeks, sometimes longer, he loaded the Beetle with camping gear and drove us north to Kegenes in southern Denmark, just two hours from home but far enough to feel like discovery.

The campsite was nothing more than a meadow with beach access. Ten families at first, then more as word spread among camping fanatics. The only toilet required a kilometer walk. We paid one Danish crown per day. My brother and I slept in our own tent while my parents and two sisters occupied the car and later the caravan my father built himself during school holidays, enlisting us as apprentice craftsmen.

When we arrived at campsites throughout Germany and Austria—small places along the Rhine and Mosel, or lakes we’d visit at Easter and autumn holidays—people stared at our contraption. The DIY caravan had no windows, looked like an ugly tin box, until my father lifted the roof to reveal homemade tent walls extending upward. My younger sister, born in 1956, slept in the third bed inside. My brother and I felt proud and independent in our separate tent, exploring each new area as thoroughly as we knew our own village.

The last family camping trip came when I was seventeen, joining a crowd of more than thirty young people at Lake Ossiach in Austria. One afternoon, several of us swam across the lake and back while our red rubber rowing boat accompanied us for safety. I remember the satisfaction of that crossing—the body’s capability, the middle distance where you can’t see either shore clearly, the commitment required to keep swimming.

That pattern would repeat itself throughout my life: the decision to leave familiar ground, the middle distance where turning back becomes impossible, the satisfaction of reaching the far shore.

Building and Leaving

During my first two semesters at the University of Kiel, my father decided to build his own house. He’d found a neighbor willing to sell part of his front garden, close enough that his four children could cycle to university without needing cars. Money was short—he was the sole breadwinner while my mother managed household, garden, washing, cleaning, shopping, and cooking for six people. They were both always busy. I remember precisely our daily rhythm: 6:30 or 7am until 2pm when we’d meet for cooked lunch, then relatively free afternoons without lessons or appointments.

My brother and I spent twelve months on bricklaying and other DIY tasks, building the house that would secure our futures. When it was nearly finished, we took a few weeks off and drove to northern Spain and France—Barcelona, Pamplona, San Sebastián, Lacanau at the ocean, then back via Paris. We had earned that distance.

By eighteen I had my driving license. I drove my Citroën 2CV to Dubrovnik with two school friends, later to Athens and Istanbul with my girlfriend, always camping or sleeping in the car with seats removed and placed beside it like improvised furniture. The 2CV wasn’t much, but it was enough. Freedom requires surprisingly little equipment.

The Namibian Years

Wanderlust changes character when you have children. In Windhoek, Namibia, from 1988 to 1994, my wife and I traveled extensively with friends, exploring the country off-road, camping in the Namib Desert and along the Skeleton Coast. We’d bought an old Land Rover and a Volkswagen van. I’d brought a roof tent from Germany—we slept on top of either vehicle while our children, six and eight years old on arrival, slept safely in the locked car below.

Those were the years of apartheid’s collapse, though you wouldn’t know it from our camping trips into landscapes that had remained unchanged for millennia. The Hartmann Valley, Damaraland, the coastal dunes—these places operated on geological time, indifferent to human political arrangements. We drove through Botswana, Zimbabwe, saw Victoria Falls, crossed through the Caprivi Strip. Our children learned that the world was larger and stranger than any classroom could convey.

Before returning to Germany in 1994 to resume teaching, we took them around the world. Hamburg to California, then Auckland, five months exploring New Zealand before flying back via the USA. Our daughter, by then in Year 9, said to me years later while walking along the Brisbane River during her first visit: “This was one of the best decisions you’ve ever made.”

She understood what I’d learned from my father: that education and wanderlust are inseparable.

The Australian Continent

Working for Education Queensland from 1998 to 2005, I mostly traveled by airplane, carrying laptop and beamer to hotels and schools for in-service training with Australian teachers of German. But whenever possible, I toured Queensland roads in my Troopie, visiting national parks, the hinterland, Fraser and Moreton Islands—places accessible only by 4×4, which became my preferred destinations.

Twice I drove to Melbourne and around Tasmania. Once I drove to Canberra for a two-week seminar, then headed for the coast and drove north via Sydney back to Brisbane. The continent revealed itself slowly, in segments, each trip adding detail to my understanding of scale and distance and ecological diversity.

But the most significant journey was to Cape York with my son and his girlfriend. They’d already seen the Red Centre—Alice Springs and Uluru—and wanted more outback experience. Since I couldn’t spare weeks on the road, they drove my Troopie north to Cairns where I met them by plane. One week driving beyond Port Douglas to reach the Cape, one week returning, another week relaxed camping at the beach.

My son, his girlfriend, and I were so close to each other during those three weeks that all the months I’d spent in Brisbane without them that year were compensated for by this single trip. Wanderlust isn’t ultimately about distance from home—it’s about proximity to people who matter, achieved paradoxically by leaving familiar ground together.

The Settled Wanderer

Now retired on the Gold Coast, my wanderlust continues but has evolved. My wife Maria Ines and I camp regularly with our 4×4 and our twenty-five-year-old Golf caravan—quarterly trips of a few days, plus eighteen nights every year starting December 26th when the coast becomes unbearable with tourist crowds.

We prefer non-booking freedom, places like Running Creek at Lions Road where you might not see another soul for days. Our pattern is cloverleaf loops into the hinterland first—up to 2,500 kilometers per trip—then efficient return via the M1. Over ten years we’ve covered the region systematically: Newcastle south to Gladstone north, with all the elevated, ecologically distinct interior country between.

On weekday afternoons after my morning writing session, I ride my Suzuki V-Strom 1000 into the Northern Rivers hinterland—M1 south for fast access past coastal congestion, then slowly home on minor roads where no cars are. These solo rides feed my writing differently than camping trips do. The motorcycle demands attention and solitude; the landscape reveals itself kinesthetically through temperature changes descending into valleys, the smell of rainforest, occasional wallabies at dusk.

My father’s camping ethos has proven remarkably durable. The wanderlust he instilled by loading four children into a VW Beetle and driving to a Danish meadow for one crown per day continues six decades later, transplanted from Baltic islands to Australian hinterland, from homemade caravans to modern 4x4s, but essentially unchanged.

Jean Paul wrote: “Der Liebe Sehnsucht fordert Ferne”—love’s longing demands distance. He meant romantic love, but the principle applies more broadly. To love a place requires leaving it regularly, seeing it from the far shore, then choosing to return. That rhythm—departure, distance, return—has structured my entire adult life.

The wanderlust my father gave me wasn’t restlessness or dissatisfaction with home. It was the understanding that staying put requires periodic movement, that deep knowledge of place paradoxically demands its temporary abandonment, that the familiar only reveals its full character when viewed from sufficient distance.

At seventy-six, I still measure my life in kilometers traveled, landscapes encountered, that middle distance where neither shore is clearly visible but you keep swimming anyway.