BMW European Delivery - Part 5

Okay, we have now completed the delivery of our BMW 335 M-sport at the The Welt in Munich Germany.  So what do we do next?????  We drive.

Our itinerary has us headed south out of Munich to Garmisch via Castle Neuwanschtein on Day 1.  Then after staying the night in Garmish, day 3 would have us get up early and drive through the Alps (specifically Stelvio Pass) down through Milan to the cast and over to Monte Carlo where we would again stay one more night before doing some driving in the south of France and dropping the car of in Nice.  We will share as much of the story and pictures with you as we can.  Just check back over the next we days and we will keep uploading them.

So, first thing first.  We have just picked up the car at the Welt, loaded up our tunes ( we brought along 15 GB of music on a thumb drive and uploaded it all to the car for the ride…..we began with some Jimmy Hendrix – Vodoo Child), plugged our hotel address into the iDrive, and told it we want to stop at Neuwanschtein along the way.  The car leads us out of Munich and has us headed south on the E533 autobahn.

Now, we have driven in Germany before…..but we haven’t ever driven this far or in this powerful of a car.  Normally, we are just driving locally and doing so in a small engined “estate” vehicle (euro speak for a station wagon.  What we were doing this time was embarking on a 700+ mile trip in a 300+ hp sports car that was fully capable of exploiting the autobahn to its full potential.  Or maybe not……

You see there is one problem with driving full throttle.  This is a brand new car and it has break in requirements.  Back at the Welt we had been careful to inquire what the break in requirements were.  The BMW personnel told us to keep it under 4500 rpm and 100 mph.  We chose to ignore that second part, but to follow the rpm guidance.  But no worries as 4500 rpm in 6th is somewhere north of 130 mph.

So back to the autobahn.  We heard about these roads, as have you, but there is something truly majestic about a smooth road where everyone is driving perfectly at well above 100mph.  We settled into a cruise hovering around 120 mph and being sure to follow the German road rules (i.e. driving “right”).

This drive didn’t take all that long really.  It was about 70 miles to Neuwanschtein and perhaps unsurprisingly after we got out of Munich that only took us about 30 minutes.  Once we got to Neuwanschtein we found a nice spot to stop and take a load of photos

We didn’t go up into Neuwanschtein but we did drive around the area and can understand how Walt Disney was inspired to build Cinderellas’ castle from seeing it.

From there we continued our trek toward Garmisch.  We had to get a bit of a move on because we didn’t leave Munich until about 3 in the afternoon and it was almost 5 by the time we got done at Neuwanschtein.  We made our way around some winding roads and about 20 minutes later arrived at our hotel in Garmish.  Once we got to Garmish there was a bit of rain coming down, but we didn’t mind as we went and found a nice restaurant on the main street in town and ate some great schnitzel.

The car to this point has been more then we could have imagined.  Even following the 4500 rpm break in limit, the car has been incredibly fast, comfortable, and remarkably fuel efficient (especially considering 90% of out time had been spent above 100mph) averaging about 27mpg after our first fill up.

Here a bunch of very large photos (take your time if you click one) of our trip south.  As always check back with www.eastbounddown.com in the next few days for the next part of our journey…..Stelvio Pass.

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Related Articles:

• BMW European Delivery – Part 8 Drop off and the French Riviera
• BMW European Delivery – Part 7 – The road to Monte Carlo
• BMW European Delivery – Part 6 – Stelvio Pass!