7.00am Breakfast in a café in the park where the campsite is. Janna is worried that there are elephants in the park. Yogi Bear might also show up at any time. We notice that in the toilets there is actually just one Schubert song repeating over and over again. We set off for a 1000km drive.

AUTOGRILLS: a big feature of the day. Main floor: café bar, till, sandwiches. Loos. Upper floor: Buffet, sit down restaurant. Back downstairs: obligatory routing through shop that sells cheeses, wines, meats, CDs, toothbrushes for 5 euros, (porno) mags and videos, soft toys that snore and a pyramid display of enormous jars of nutella. The colours are red and yellow and there are soldiers in several of the stops. People aren’t into queuing.

8.00 – 15.00 We re-trace our steps back to Bologna. I drive through some of the tunnels and viaducts. Scary Mary but its getting easier. Janna and Kanina watch a bit of a movie in the back and Valeria updates me on local Italian politics. There seems to be a level of dialogue and investment that is rare in my experience at least, of anglo-cultures. V thinks it often just amounts to sophisticated moaning and that at the end of the day half the country voted for Berlusconi. Still, it is good to be somewhere where it feels like there’s a public engagement beyond ‘make tea not war’ and the endless reproduction of cosy ironic set piece critiques and commentaries.

15.00-21.00 Bologna – Innsbruck. V drives us through the Alps. There is a full moon so its all on spooky view. Around Trento we find an Auto Stop that has wireless. The signal is dodgy and the only place we can get it is if the laptop is placed on a bin outside. We gather round excitedly and manage to get a post up. Sill nowhere to plug in though and power is out. Crossing to Austria and immediately the landscape is different. No more pasta serving Auto Grills, the roads get a bit wider and the driving more rational…. Janna and I talk about setting up our own research centre. I think we’ve had versions of this conversation 100 times – and it gets better and perhaps more real each time. How to lever any institutional position to create something that supports and frames all the things we do anyway, except in a haphazard way…

21.00 – 24.00 Innsbruck to Munich: Apart from the last of the Alps foothills the driving’s pretty straightforward. The signage immaculate and the lanes more numerous. Its always fun for juveniles to be in countries where ‘fahrt’ type words occur regularly on signage… Kanina and I are talking about music and a bad Irish pub near the native centre in Toronto that she has frequented on many occasions. Apparently Kanina can sing along with some of the stagey Irish songs (janna brought a CD for torture).. but only when drunk. I will have to experiment….

00.30 Motorway near Munich airport. No time or money for a proper campsite tonight so we pull into a layby off the motorway with a bunch of truckers. Unconscious.