Considered by many to be the top driving tour in Europe, and perhaps even one of the top three in the world (next to Australia’s Great Ocean Road or California’s Highway 1), Germany’s Alpine Road stretches over 450 kilometres through the Alps. There’s no real reason to do this drive… it’s a drive for the hell of it, winding through the mountains, tiny German towns, and castles along the way. Why not?

Katarina Klett is a third-year chemical engineering student at the University of Pittsburgh. At school, she works as a calculus tutor in the Math Assistance Center (MAC) and as a Peer Advisor for the Swanson School of Engineering. When not at the MAC or in the engineering building, she can be found in the Adipose Stem Cell Center, where Katarina worked as a Student Researcher since the summer following her freshman year.

The sun was shining when I stopped my motorbike by an old tractor in rural Norway. 15 years earlier, I had worked on a machine just like it for my brother-in-law and I was looking forward to telling him about it at the kitchen table one evening in the future. At the same moment I remembered what I had seen and tried in Denmark, Germany, Netherlands, Belgium, France and England. My travelogue was getting too long for me to tell it over a single cup of tea.