Trust Google Maps.
Use it and trust it. Unless you want to go on a crazy adventure, have no worries about time, an extra phone battery, some water and maybe a flare. You see I think I know what I'm doing. Most of the time I'm right. Got the power to maneuver maps like a pro from my mom, but sometimes I'm horribly wrong.
Take today for instance: beautiful day, time to spare, new places to see! Why not walk to the places in town instead of paying for a bus ticket? I looked on the google maps satellite and mapped my route through town. And what a beautiful town it is. Herzogenaurach is a smaller town North West of Nuremberg and houses the biggest names in sport brands across the stret from each other. (Long story short: the creators of Puma and Adidas were brothers who got into a big fight and split their company and moved into offices on either side of the street, and have been huge rivals ever since.) Puma and a Nike outlet are easy to get to by foot, on the main side of town, they have sideways and easy access roads, Adidas on the other hand has it's headquarters a little outside of the city and the outlet down the way off of a larger road. If this particular large road had a sidewalk, it would take 5 minutes walking to get from the headquarters to the outlet store, but of course it doesn't. You have two options according to google maps, a 45 minute walk North, up and around a large wooded area, or 45 minutes south, around a bunch of neighborhoods with no cut-throughs. Here is where I used my big brains.
On the google maps satellite is a bike path or dirt road that parallels this major road from the nike outlet to Adidas. It's a beautiful day, and really no need to see what's so far out of the way north or south, so what the hell, let's cut through. No big deal the first third of the way. Corn fields on the right, trees and bushes on the left, the storm clouds rolling away. After a split in the path, I hang right to stay on the straight path to the store, and things get a little... Sticky. Well probably more muck than anything, and it is now all over my non-hiking shoes, and I'm beginning to slip. I was a Boy Scout (Venture crew #22!) so I know the terrain, and know that if I stick to the edge of the path where vegetation is growing, the ground will be more compact and I won't sink into the mud as much. Great idea except all of these bushes are spiky. Mud it is.
I am not slowed down to a crawl, thank god not literally, but my estimated 5 minute swift walk is now a 25 minute sludge. With each step I need to make sure I don't sink more that an inch down, and avoid the puddles left behind by the passing cloud. 20 minutes of this and I can see the distant Adidas sign, and pick up a little speed (motivation!) but soon after come across unoccupied plows, apparently on break from digging a canal. Yep, right in the middle of my path. Around it it is. Sludge. Sludge. Almost slip, catch myself, sludge. At the end of the road, now 30 minutes in, I walk through a construction site and into a McDonalds parking lot. My poor shoes are dark brown, and I'm leaving footprints in circles around the parking lot as I stomp like a lunatic trying to shake off as much mud and muck as I can.
Needless to say I didn't not walk back, and called to be picked up, and was back in 3 minutes by car. I guess I got the adventure I was looking for, just not how I imagined it. I really should have trusted google the first time.