DJ - Guten Tag! Good day from Austria. Our commitment to stay in touch with you from very unlikely places and in very unlikely ways of communicating is being fulfilled at this instance as we speak to you from the Austrian Alps from inside the 1954 Packard as we travel from Italy to our overnight destination in Germany. We're presently using an European GSN digital cellular telephone. It's the middle of the afternoon on Thursday, October the 16th. In the United States, the day is just beginning. Carl is at the wheel ably driving through snow drifts. The pavement is wet, it's foggy, there's a mixture of rain and snow. We have just left an Austrian village of St. Anton. We're now entering the village of Lurz and making a stop here for checking in with the road rally. Our update report is reaching you from the snow covered Austrian Alps and we're proceeding to get across the Alps through a series of passes. We're currently in the Arlberg pass and we're going to be going through a series of passes, including the Hochen pass. We went through the Brenner pass a few hours ago. Carl has pulled the car over so let me hand the phone over to him momentarily for his comments. Carl, we've gone from the Pakistani sand storms to the fog and snow of the Austrian Alps.

CS - Yes, and Don it's too bad because the description we could give of the Arlberg pass would be very interesting to people. This is one of the major passes in the east-west travel of Austria. It's beautiful. The Arlberg is where modern skiing started. The Hans Schneider Ski School in the 40's was transformed to the Sun Valley Ski School and modern skiing, parallel skiing began all right here at the Arlberg. We must move on because we've got a short time to get to our next time control and it is still snowing. Here's Don.

DJ - Well we entered Austrian at the border with Italy and we experienced yet again the European economic community situation where the borders are now open and it no longer takes periods of time to move between the European community countries. The open cockpit automobiles are enduring the cold, wet and rainy weather and doing so with good spirit. However, I must say I'm glad that we have a modern car and are inside the 1954 Packard and you can be assured that we do not have the convertible top down at this time. There is snow on the peaks of the Austrian Alps and it's mid October and the onset of Winter is just beginning here. We left this morning from an absolutely extraordinary beautiful location, Lake Garda. If you're looking for a pleasure holiday in northern Italy, we would highly recommend the Lake Garda area. It's a location similar to Door County in Wisconsin or northern Michigan. It's a resort area. The lake is probably as large as one of the small Great Lakes, it's a very large lake. It's just an absolutely beautiful area. There were wind surfers out in the water this morning. The folks on Lake Winnebago in Wisconsin who enjoy wind surfing would be amazed at the excellent wind surfing conditions on Lake Garda.

The fuel prices in Italy are about $5 a gallon. We're incurred about $1,200 of repairs on our journey, which is currently about 14,000 miles from Beijing.

We had a wonderful personal experience that we would like to share with our friends, Barbara and Peter Stone in Wisconsin. The experience was that we had a reunion with Berner and Corra Wachter at the border of Italy and Austria. We caught up with the Wachters, who were kind enough to provide warm drink and soup and it was a great reunion. We have not seen them for more than a dozen years. As Peter recalls, we were with Berner on another adventure some 15 years ago when we traveled by BMW motorcycle 6,000 kilometers through the Soviet Union. We have plenty of pictures and video to share with our friends, the Stones, in Wisconsin from Corra and Berner Wachter of Nemen, Austria.

We've entered our ninth country on our journey from Peking to Paris. Some would say eleventh if you count Tibet and San Marino. So it's either nine or eleven depending how you interpret international politics. We're proceeding now to Germany where we'll be overnighting on Thursday, October the 16th.

The '54 Packard is running well, ideally suited as heavy as it is, for the wet and snowy conditions. Carl and I have exchanged snowballs. He was gruffing that some of the snow got inside the car and made the upholstery wet. We'll work that out. We were also pelted with snowballs by the mechanical service crew that normally helps us keep the car running, but they damaged the side of the car with heavy snow balls here at 4,000 - 5,000 feet in the Austrian Alps. That's our circumstances here at mid day on Thursday. We're proceeding on looking forward to the next 48 hours which will bring us to our ultimate destination in Paris. On behalf of Carl, this is Don wishing you well and thanking you for joining us on this update which comes to you from the Austrian Alps and we'll say auf Wiedersehen and we'll see you on the next update down the road. So long.