Day 1, Saturday 10th August

In August 2013 my daughter Denise got married and wanted to use the BMW as the wedding car and of course I was more than happy to do that. On the day I drove her to the town hall in Dordrecht myself and the car was used afterwards for a photo-shoot around the area. Both my daughter (and her husband) and me (and my wife) have friends in Karpathos, Greece, so having the wedding in August meant that they could not come.  We therefore decided to take the wedding to them one week later. Now as I absolutely hate flying (not the flying itself but the hassle at the airports) and I had always wanted to drive to Greece, this presented the perfect opportunity. I would drive there in the BMW and the rest of the extended party would fly, I couldn’t talk anyone into coming with me. Not being restricted with baggage issues I had the room to carry the wedding dress and the suits which we wanted to use for a photo-shoot and party there. My son-in-law is a keen diver and asked me if I’d take his diving equipment with me so the car ended up being quite full.

I didn’t really get to take too many photo’s on the move but here are a few.

I had done some analysis of routes and costs by using a spread sheet and decided on the best route, not necessarily the absolute cheapest but the route which seemed the most efficient. I left home at 6 am. on the Saturday morning and headed to the south west of the Netherlands where I crossed the border at Venlo into Germany and followed the E31(A61) south. The weather was glorious, passing Koblenz and Mannheim I followed the road before turning onto the E35(A5) just past the Hockenheim circuit towards Karlsruhe. Most of this route was well known to me from my years working in transport and apart from some minor delays due to road works it passed uneventfully with a couple of stops for fuel and refreshment. Before Karlsruhe I sat in some long queues and then heading towards Stuttgart on the E52(A8) I ran into a lot more traffic before getting to Ulm. Leaving the route heading south to pick up the E43(A7) I got further delayed in Ulm due to some serious road works and road closures with detours where TomTom got into a bit of a tiz and let me down. Once past Ulm the traffic situation seemed to improve and after turning onto the E532 at Memmingham we reached the Austrian border with no further delays. Once across the border through the tunnel at Füssen I stopped for fuel in Reutte and then headed up into the Fern Pass, something I had been looking forward to.

The pass itself didn’t disappoint although it would have been better without the traffic :-). Going south was not too bad but the traffic coming towards me heading for Germany seemed like an endless queue, standing still at times. There were passing lanes in a few places so when I reached one I pulled out and gunned it passed the offending caravan or camper. Over the top down the other side I soon reached Imst (the pass is only just over 60km) and the E60(A12) autobahn towards Innsbruck. This was another short blast of 60km and from Innsbruck I took the E45 south over the Brenner pass. Once in Italy the Autostrada di Brennero is a great piece of road winding down from the Alps to the plains of central Italy cutting through tunnels where you just have to wind down the window, change back a gear or two and floor it – brilliant, I’ll probably never grow up :-). The home stretch from the border at Vipiteno, passing by Bolzano and Trento, to Verona where I was stopping for the night is about 235 km, a little under 2 hours. By this time it was very late in the afternoon and the long day was beginning to get to me. I had to pull in to one of the rest stations about half way and grab a double espresso and stretch my legs for a bit. The last leg found me eventually arriving at Hotel Antichi Cortili at around quarter to eight. Extremely warm with the sound of the crickets echoing around the courtyard and parking area, I grabbed some stuff out of the car, checked in, deposited my stuff in the room and took a  quick shower. About an hour later I was sitting at the restaurant outside the hotel with a glass of wine looking at the menu. The first day was done and dusted – 1163km.

Here is some video of the first leg of the trip.