In our fast-paced world, we tend to unlearn in our daily lives how to spend time in less productive ways. Often this change in attitude occurs only when we find ourselves in less-stimulating environments. From our experience, leaving the big-city life behind for a few days induces a tremendous recharging process of our inner batteries. For this reason, we once again headed to the middle of nowhere in August 2023. This time, we met with twenty-year olds from eight German states in the Hesse Highlands to hike, cook together, swim, play board games, make campfires, watch the stars and hold funny and meaningful conversations.

The Middle Ages bequeathed many castles and fortresses to Central Germany. Nowadays many of them are open for day visitors, and amazingly enough, some of the historic sites are even open as vacation rentals. Staying at these extraordinary places for a few days provides an opportunity to spend time doing creative and unusual activities. During our stay at the castle Martinfeld, we made crowns, bought soft swords and reinterpreted the site’s history with our own role-play games and songs.

Whereas the castle was a modern youth hostel, our stay at the fortress Lohra represented a true visit to the former times; we were expected to heat and cook with wood stoves, live in the shelter of donkey drivers and cope with the freezing cold of the winter without heating. As no one else would come up with the glorious idea to visit this site in winters, we had the whole area to ourselves which was also got a little spooky from time to time.