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THE ORIGIN OF ZUFALL

The story of Tim and Valerie embracing chance.

July 1st, 2000 (Canada Day). It was not your typical first date. We had decided to go camping, and while we had met a few times this was the first time we would be hanging out just the two of us…our first date for lack of a better term.

coin-flipWe had skirted the decision of where we would camp and so when I bounded out to his car with my gear slung over my shoulder, I had no idea what the weekend would bring. Crippled with a lack of decisiveness, we flipped a coin…heads it would be north or south, tails it would be east or west. It came up heads, so we flipped again – this time heads was north, tails was south. Tails. We buckled in and hit the road.

Still unsure of our route, I asked how far we wanted to go. Bolstered by the thrill of our spontaneous decision making process, we decided once again to let fate decide. We started with a heads it’s a more than a four hour drive, tails it’s less…and we continued on until we leveled off at a 3 hour drive. And the indecision continued – that weekend the coin helped us decide our route at a fork in the road, it directed us to the campground on the right instead of the left and it even narrowed down the exact campsite. We never regretted a single decision because we never made one!

Zufall Dice

Since then, we’ve perfected the process with our directional dice and distance dice – or Green and Blue as we like to call them. We’re quite addicted to the adventure of spontaneous travel, the challenge of sticking to what the dice dictate and finding the fun no matter where we end up. We’ve spent weekends in towns we didn’t know existed, traveled halfway across the world, had picnics in urban parks and wandered through parts of our city like we were tourists. We even spent five days letting the dice tell us our daily destination – that was an interesting zigzag of a route!

The more we told friends and colleagues about how we found adventure, the more we got the feeling that there were lots of people who would be interested in doing what we do. We decided we needed to share and Zufall was born. Zufall is the German word for random chance or coincidence and it seemed a fitting way to describe our adventures. Plus, it’s fun to say.

After a few years of sharing the Original Zufall dice with the world, we realized that the perfect platform for Zufall would be on a smart phone – that way we could incorporate maps with local business information, do away with calculations and get Zufall Adventures into more hands.  And so, the Zufall Adventures App was born (for iPhone and Windows Phone 7).

There are lots of ways to Zufall and we know we have only scratched the surface, so it was really important to us to make sure putting Zufall out there was also about creating a community where people could share their adventures, ask questions and get creative with the process of letting chance decide. Use the share function on the mobile app to let us know where the dice lead you or share a longer story by emailing us here on the website.

VALERIE & TIM – ZUFALL CREATORS

(on the top of a mountain found via Zufall somewhere near Spences Bridge, BC)
 
 
 
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