BMW European Delivery – Part 8 Drop off and the French Riviera

Nov 302009

All trips must come to an end, and the European Part of our adventure is about to.

Nice

We woke up early in Monte Carlo after a night out on the Riviera. We spent the prior night people, car, and yacht watching. The car watching, while spectacular, wasn’t the highlight really. That was more the walking around the marina and looking at the super yachts. What was interesting about that was how the $5-$10 million yachts looked tiny and cheap. They’re not, but they don’t really impress when there are hundreds of $50-$100 million yachts around. One yacht in particular had an assortment of heavily armed guards and a large photo of some Arabian leader in the lounge area at the back of the yachts (no photos unfortunately….the guys with the guns said no.)

But that was last night, today we have an appointment to drop of the car withTT tranist in Nice (the company provided by BMW to ship the car) at approximately 3:30 p.m…..so we pretty much have all day to play around on the French Riviera.

First priority was to get the car washed. Now generally we are pretty particular about our car washing, but today all we are looking for is a touch free wash to rinse the car free of grime for it’s travel to the United States. This didn’t sound like to tough of an idea…but we were wrong. Prior to arriving in Monte Carlo we tried to scout out a good car wash place via the Internet, but we didn’t have too much luck with that. All we could really find were car detailing services….and we are against that. We like to wash our cars ourselves…and did I mention we are a bit particular? We don’t want someone swirl marking our cars.

Our French isn’t terrible, but it’s not very good either so asking the front desk at the hotel was no luck either. We set off on a drive to see if we could locate a coin operated “wand” power wash. We drove all over Monaco…..there wasn’t one. So we decided to drive to Menton (the next town over towards / in Italy). The good news is that there is a car wash in Menton. The bad news is there is a car wash in Mention….a car wash….one. And the whole town of Melton was in line waiting to use it. We did have almost all day to make it to Nice, and though we wanted to get the car washed it isn’t the only thing we wanted to do that day. So we set off west towards Nice. Luckily along the way somewhere near Eze we found a car wash. This one:

Maybe not the greatest car wash ever, but it worked. We couldn’t really read the directions so we just pumped the machine full of euros till water started spraying out. Then we washed the grime off the car and filled up with gas for the rest of the journey.

From here we continued along the Cornish and took in the sites. It was a glorious day and made for great views along the coast. We made it Nice pretty early (around 10:00 am) so we decided to do a drive through the town and went and scouted out where we needed to drop the car later in the day. Once we found it we decided to drive on a little further to the town of Antibes to get some lunch and site see. This was a good choice. Once we found a good car parking space (in the Antibes Marina) we got out and walked around the town and found a nice seafood joint to eat lunch nearby the city walls. Antibes was a very nice city and again had great views pretty much as all of the Riviera has.

Earlier we mentioned that the Yachts in Monte Carlo were amazing, and the were. However there was one here in Atibes that was a little better than any we saw in Monaco. It wasn’t in the marina, but that is because it didn’t have to be. It had a helicopter.

I don’t know a whole lot about yachts, but I do know ones with helicopters are cooler than ones without helicopters.

Now that we had eaten lunch and driven all over the Riviera, it is time to go drop off the car with TT transit. We came back to the car in the marina and saw a neat neighbor parked next to our 335. I know Smart’s are now in the US, but you still don’t see them parked quite like this.

As we had already scouted out the area it was easy to find the drop off location. It was near the airport, co located with a bunch of shipping and handling companies. There were a number of other BMW’s lined up, all obviously part of the euro delivery program. But there were also a number of Renaults and Peugots…..potentially part of their delivery programs.

After we parked the car I walked over to the TT office and spoke with the girl at the desk. We didn’t really speak so much as my French was as equally bad a her English, but I gave her all the papers for the car and she completed the other required forms to ship the car back to the US. After all was completed I asked her to call a taxi and she did. From there we went out and waited for the taxi.

Once the taxi came it took us on about a 2 mile drive to the airport. The taxi driver then charged 25 euros or so (I forget the exact amount) which was an terribly high amount, but we decided not to argue with it in French with the driver and just paid the amounts.

Now it is off to the worst part of the European Delivery experience. The Wait.

We picked up the car from The Welt on July 27th

We dropped it of in Nice on July 29th

We wouldn’t see it again until September 165h. 49 days later.

It was a long 49 days, but we were very happy to have it back. That is the end of our euro delivery tale, but the beginning of the next part of our story with the car.

Check out with Eastbounddown.com in the next few days for our impressions of the car in the US, plus some pictures of the car properly washed.