½ km
I was lucky my elementary school was only half a kilometer away from our house, so from an early age I was able to walk there and back. In younger years our nanny took me there but I hardly remember those walks. Later I really enjoyed going to school by myself because I could focus on all the small details on the way.
Having left our house and walked around the corner I loved sliding my hands along the thick oval leaves of the tall rubber hedge that bordered our garden. After that I usually checked if the red Volkswagen Passat of our next door neighbor Opa ██████ was parked in the driveway or not. Further down the road, I had to rush past a certain gate because an evil German shepherd lived there, and nothing scared me more than big dogs. Then came the house with the hippies my parents always ridiculed for their organic and antiauthoritarian lifestyle and I had to cross a small street.
The main attraction here was the cigarette vending machine mounted on the empty beige wall of a house at the corner I liked to investigate thoroughly, checking for coins in the change return slot and inspecting new cigarette brand logos and typesets. Camel was my favorite. Then came some nice wild looking gardens with a lot of flowers. Sometimes I got stressed about being late for school after zoning out for so long that I completely lost track of time. I didn't have a watch back then, but I quickly memorized which types of cars parked at the curb had clocks on their dashboards.
Like with the cigarette packages I got more and more interested in the different logos, icons, and typefaces on cars, on car door windows, car headlights, hub caps, and bumper stickers. They inspired me to spend time during class creating my own logos and experimenting with various fonts. Luckily, I shared this fascination with █████████, who took the same route to school as I did. Whenever we met on the way, we would discuss our favorite icons, invent secret organizations that might use them as logos, or argue over which logos were ours. I vividly remember the stylized cat logo of SEV Marchal, which could be found on many Renaults and Peugeots, being my favorite, while █████████ favored the four pointed compass-rose star shape found in the Subaru logo.
After school, I usually stopped by the convenience store and candy shop directly across from the school, a location that was, in retrospect, a marketing masterstroke. There I would spend my pocket money on gummy bears, chewing-gum cigarettes, and rum-flavored chocolate balls, all of which seemed perfectly normal to children growing up in 1980s West Germany. Or I bought Panini sticker packs for my albums, most notably those based on Disney's The Jungle Book and the WWF—the wildlife conservation organization, not the wrestling federation. That came later.
Sometimes other kids from my class joined me on the walk home, pulling me out of my private world of logos and typefaces. Since I lived closest to the school, our front steps became an unofficial after-school hangout. We'd sit there laughing, shouting, and wasting time until I finally went inside and the others continued on toward their own homes.