Together with his wife and a chauffeur, the poet and writer Otto Julius Bierbaum undertook one of the first tourist car journeys in 1902 in a convertible of the Adler brand. His report, written in the form of letters, details the trip from Berlin through Vienna to the Italian Sorrento and back over the Swiss Alps to the Rhine. It is primarily a poetic travelogue in the style of Seume's "Walk to Syracuse." At the same time, the text serves as an ironic account of a technical pioneering achievement in a pre-modern world lacking developed roads, gas stations, and repair shops.