Entries tagged as car
Tuscany 2006 – Journey/Day 1
Saturday, September 23. 2006Friday night 11:58pm it was done
- the car fully packed
- house and farm secured
- seating order inside the car figured out
- root planning and who drives when figured out.
We were on out way to Italy!
I had to pack my stuff in two instances, since I didn’t have all the necessary goods in Bamberg, but it was not to complicated for me since I don’t need too much stuff on such a holiday: Some adequate clothing, photo camera, my notebook computer and something to read. Not too big requirements. But since the lens of my camera is still broken I had to borrow some replacement. Luckily Jochen helped out and lent me his EF-28-135mm IS. Books to read I had organized the day before, notebook and external hard disk to deal with some media during my holidays I had packed in Bamberg, so I only had to complete my clothing in Truppach.
I had the honour to drive the first part of the about 1000km to Acquaviva/Siena in the southern Tuscany. My father’s BMW X5 is a nice car, but driving on the highway I’d have somehow preferred my limousine. Manual gear shift, less noise while driving and a better holding on bends are my arguments in favour of my car. But I guess complaining about this is just nit-picking because I’m not used to the X5, and I’ve been driving my 5-series for about 5 years… traditionally we didn’t take the Brenner Highway, but the old mountain pass, but I made it down to Sterzing in a decent time. There we had a two hours break, before my father took us down the remaining distance. On the way down there we had a remarkable incident with our BMW navigation system. Between Bologna and Modena it received a traffic Jam through it’s TMC and wanted us to drive some 200(!)km detour. We didn’t listen to its recommendation – and at the end there was no jam at all!
Arriving shortly between 12am we immediately got our flat, and could relax there after a strenuous journey. Later that day we shortly visited Montepulciano to buy some stuff at the local supermarket, and at the end of the day we had a very delicious dinner at the L’Angolo restaurant in Acquaviva.
Dinner: Spaghetti a la carbonara – Pizza L’Angolo - Profiteroles
Ignition switch broken or - fun in the sun
Wednesday, July 19. 2006Today I was about to fetch a card for the student concert of the Bamberg Symphonic Orchestra from a friend, and was very astonished, that my car was still running after pulling the ignition key. At first I just left the car running and got the card, but even very sincere tries to use the ignition lock again were useless. So I drove to the next BMW garage and got an engineer to have a look at the ignition lock. The fast diagnosis was: ignition lock broken, replacement parts for 120€ needed (shipment will take about 3 working days, since the new lock needs to be especially encoded for the key), replacement will cost another 120€. FUN. I had even more fun walking home a good part of the way down from Hallstadt, since there was no bus running at that time. FUN IN THE SUN.