When my friend invited me on the road trip she had planned from Northern Italy to Berlin, I couldn’t resist saying yes. A road trip through Europe has been a longstanding dream. Pic courtesy/Rosalyn D'Mello

It is only when the road finally stretches endlessly before you that you begin to grasp the nuances of distance and the arbitrariness of borders. Google maps will inform you of the scope of the journey from point A to point B, offering simultaneously a calculation of how much time the trajectory will consume. You catch a cartographic glimpse of the landscape through which you will traverse, but until you are in the front seat of a locomotive machine, you cannot quite imagine it. When Elif, one of the artists at the residency I'd been invited to in Bolzano/Bozen, invited me on the road trip she had planned from Northern Italy to Berlin, I couldn't resist saying yes. A road trip through Europe has been a longstanding dream. And so, on Monday morning at 11.30am, we picked up the rental car we'd reserved and began our journey to Berlin.