My hotel no longer existed

On stage 78 of my walk across Europe, I arrived in Semily, Czechia, after a long day on the road.

I had booked and paid for a hotel room weeks earlier. At around 5 p.m., I reached the majestic building wanting little more than a shower and a bed.

The doors were locked. There was no sign of life, and nobody answered the reception phone.

Eventually, some construction workers emerged. They spoke no English, but I managed to understand that the hotel had closed and was being converted into apartments.

I showed them my confirmed reservation.

They called their manager, who agreed to let me stay in a room that had not yet been gutted.

It was dirty and had no bedsheets. But I was not sleeping outside.

That night, alone in what felt like an abandoned haunted manor, I kept wondering:
What had gone wrong?
What should I have checked?
What could I have done differently?

Something had clearly gone wrong.

But that did not mean I had done something wrong.

Why was my mind so determined to find a mistake?

Perhaps because blaming myself offered a reassuring explanation. If I had forgotten to check something, I could check it next time. If I had made a mistake, I could correct it. The world would remain predictable and the outcome controllable.

The alternative was more unsettling: I had made a reasonable decision with the information available and it had still produced a bad outcome.

Of course, hindsight can always identify one more precaution. I could have called the hotel the previous day. I could have reconfirmed a reservation that had already been confirmed.

But how many confirmed arrangements should we reconfirm? At some point, reasonable preparation ends and uncertainty begins.

Not every bad outcome contains a lesson about what we should have done differently. Sometimes the lesson is simply that our control has limits.

The Perspective Shift

Learn from genuine mistakes. But before blaming yourself, ask: was there information I could reasonably have known and acted on at the time or am I using hindsight to make an uncontrollable outcome feel preventable?

The hotel had closed. I had prepared reasonably. There was no useful mistake to correct.

I could not change what had happened. I could still decide what happened next.

There was a night to get through and another stage to walk the following morning.

Walk your talk,
Franck

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