One of my best friends works as a pool cleaner near Alicante in Spain, and he's just had a new baby, so Mrs B and I loaded up the Z3 for an epic road trip! Last time we visited them we flew, and while the journey was shorter, relying on people for lifts, dealing with airports, passengers, public transport - just no. So we said next time we'd have an adventure try driving, and with Izzy now well sorted when the baby arrived, everything fell into place quite nicely!
We decided to try the UK-Spain ferry on the way out, and we'd come home driving all the way to Calais and then Eurotunnel. If this was to become a more frequent occurrence we'd learn which method we preferred.
Despite the Italy trip a few weeks earlier, this was the first time I got to properly use the tailored bag set. They were brilliant and also with them stuffed there was still a little room at the sides and on top for some small/soft items:
So we started off with a Sunday afternoon bimble down to Portsmouth, M1-M42-M40-A34-M27. Sun out and roof down. Quite a nostalgic journey actually since Mrs B and I briefly lived in Didcot and would often travel between there and Matlock/Sheffield to visit friends and family, so we knew that route very well, but hadn't done it in over a decade. Once through customs and into the holding lanes for the ferry, to my surprise I spotted another Z3 in the adjacent lane and a few cars ahead. The driver spotted me too and we had a quick chat. James was an English guy living in Portugal and had come back to the UK specifically to buy that car! it was an Atlanta Blue 2.8 pre-facelift and looked like with a bit of TLC would be a lovely motor. I mentioned the forum to him.
First 200 miles done and Izzy still looking reasonably clean!
The ferry was an interesting experience. I have been terribly seasick on smaller boats before, but I was hopeful that a bigger boat with stabilisers (and a bar) I'd be ok. I think regular seafarers would say the conditions were calm, but there was a definite slow rolling motion. I wasn't sick, but it was enough to make me feel a little dizzy. And sadly it was enough to put me off the bar! But 30-odd hours later we pulled into a cool and very drizzly Bilbao. We ended up alongside James again in the queue for Spanish customs, and in fact we stayed in a loose convoy for most of the way to Madrid. Would this be the only other Z3 I'd see for the whole trip...?
The first leg of the journey saw us travel all the way from the north to (almost) the south coast of Spain. Going via Zaragoza would have been marginally shorter journey, however we'd be going a lot of that way on the way home, so we decided to go southbound via Madrid instead. 534 miles arriving at the villa we were staying in at about 6pm. I am absolutely in love with Spanish motorways! The section from Madrid to Albacete in particular was a dream, silky smooth, straight, impressive scenery and almost completely empty, the only thing I was missing was cruise control, which I think I am right in saying can't even be retrofitted to my car (M52B28TU)
After we had cleared Bilbao and the rain had stopped, we had the roof down for the rest of the way. Towards the latter part of the journey there were some very big dark clouds around, and another friend who happened to be around that part of the world on a road-trip holiday of his own had to take shelter from what he said was the worst hail storm he'd ever seen. But we got lucky and missed it all. Phew! I'm not sure if a soft-top is better or worse for surviving euro-hail storms? I don't really want to find out!
We did have a strange happening on the way down, a guy in an Ocado-style delivery van came flying up behind me while I was passing somebody on a 2-lane stretch of motorway, right on my back bumper and flashing his lights. I'd usually get my toe down and get out of their way when I saw someone approaching so fast but to show just how quickly he arrived I'd not even seen him until he was already on me, anyway I got out of his way as quick as I could and gave him the most distained glare I could muster as he came alongside, when he starts frantically signaling at me that something was hanging off the car! I couldn't see, hear or feel anything, gauges were all normal, so we pulled over to the hard shoulder on the next sliproad and had a look. I couldn't see anything hanging off (or missing), none of the body panels, undertray or arch liners were loose, so we carried on. For the rest of the trip nobody else tried to signal us, there were no scrapes or knocks. I think this guy was just annoyed that I'd had the audacity to be on the road at the same time as him and wanted to panic me. What's the spanish for k***head?.
I'll not recount the stay in Alicante since this post is mainly about the journey, but we had a lovely time eating and drinking everything in sight. I drove down to the beach one morning, but decided after some of the crazy local Spanish roads, poorly marked junctions (or just not marked at all), random roundabouts and giant pot-holes, that I would park Izzy up and let her rest ahead of the return journey! I got a nice photo though to mark the most southerly part of the journey and probably the furthest that car has ever been from home... so far!
Our journey home was spread across 3 days, our first night stop was just outside Barcelona, and the second was in Dijon, France. I picked these for no other reason than that they looked to break the journey up quite evenly, and the Dijon route would keep us well away from Paris - I have history with the Parisian periphiques!
The most direct route up to Barcelona was to head away from Alicante to the north, cut across the Benidorm peninsula, hit Valencia from the south and then track north-east up the coast. However there was an opportunity I couldn't miss - many years ago I trained to be a commercial pilot, and the first 3-4 months of flight training I did was from a small airfield just outside Valencia called Requena. For any aviation-geeks this is where we did all the VFR flying and got the equivalent of a PPL licence. I haven't been back there since I completed my VFR training in April 2009, so I wanted to go back, have a look around and reminisce. It was so cool to be back there and see how much it had changed (and in other ways not changed at all) and also made me feel so old that it was 16yrs ago, but only felt like 2-3yrs had passed. I would highly recommend it to anyone in the area, even if you're not into aviation, there is a really lovely cafe.
(Closest I could find to the same angle 16yrs prior...
)
Nostalgia over and another nice Z3 postcard picture for the collection, we got back on the motorway and headed down the hill into Valencia and then up the coast to Barcelona. It was definitely busier than the in-land motorways, but still dead by UK standards. I was hoping it was going to be really picturesque with the sea on one side and mountains on the other, but it was pretty boring industrial units or plantations on both sides. Our hotel was on the far side of Barcelona, and I had imagined the motorway would be some sort of nice bypass - I was wrong. It was a motorway, but one that ran right through the city, very busy and hectic, towered over by buildings and in and out of tunnels and tight bends - it reminded me of the Aston Expressway, but with fewer Brummies.
Also Google Maps let me down entirely when the motorway split but was not shown on the map, sod's law dictated that I chose the wrong side and we watched as our car went one way while the blue line went the other - but it would not re-route and for about 3 miles I was paralysed with indecision as sliproads flew past and Google Maps said nothing. At one point it told me to take the next junction, but weirdly it was on the left side of the road, 5 lanes of traffic over and only about 50 metres ahead of where I was, so that wasn't going to happen, and then it took another minute or two to get its bearings again! Thankfully this time it told us to keep going as we were and only added about 15 mins to the ETA!
400 miles in total, one of the shorter legs of the trip in terms of mileage, but one of the longest in time after the detour to Requena took us along some beautiful, but slow and very twisty roads.
The suburb of Barcelona we were in was called Premia de Mar, we took a walk down to the marina and had some food while we decided which yacht we'd buy when we won the lotto. I picked this one:
But then I changed my mind when I remembered about the seasickness. Maybe we'll just buy one and keep it in the marina. They had a supermarket, WiFi and an Amazon locker - what more would I need?
Walking back to the hotel I saw my SECOND Z3 of the trip!! Consider yourself papped, señor/señora!
The next day was our penultimate day on the road and saw us travel from Barcelona to Dijon, 506 miles taking us along the Mediterranean coast into France and to Montpellier and then turning north past (actually through) Lyon where we had our first traffic jam since arriving on the continent, and then into Dijon. Looking at the route now on Google Maps, it looks like we used the A9, then A7, then A6, but they were just merges rather than intersections since actually on the road, we had barely left Barcelona when the next instruction on the satnav was along the lines of "in 650km, take the exit" which made me chuckle.
Our final day on the road took us from Dijon to Calais for the Eurotunnel, and then from Folkstone back to Matlock (580 miles). It was a pretty uneventful journey with one terrifying exception....
I'll not need to point this out to you lot, but the fuel tank is annoyingly small in the Z3, and with the roof down and cracking along at European motorway speeds, I was filling up every 300 miles. With this being the last leg, I was constantly doing fuel-maths in my head as we went along, and I reckoned that if I filled up within about 150km of Calais, I might just about make it home on that tank of fuel and not have to stop again - especially if I could coax Mrs B to sleep - her bladder is usually our Achilles heel when it comes to long journeys and I hate stopping unless it's for fuel. We were just over 200km away when the fuel light came on and I watched the range ticking down on the OBC faster than we were travelling (if that makes sense). I've already made a thread about the remaining range and the OBC, and I know theoretically there must be about 50 miles left even when then OBC reads zero - but I have never tested it, and on the last day of a holiday, abroad, with wife, luggage and heading to the Eurotunnel - it was not the time to be testing it out. The OBC said I had 21 miles range left, and we were approaching one service station, but there was a sign for another in 30km which would have maybe been the difference between making it home on the next tank and not. So I pushed on! To my horror, as we pulled into the next services, there was no fuel and the OBC range had just gone to "---"! And it turns out the next services were closed (Monday was a bank holiday in France!). I couldn't believe it. I found the closest petrol station I could but it was still 20km away. We made it, but those 20km were the most horrible and nerve-racking 20mins I have endured in a long time!!
And so we made it home on Monday evening after a hugely successful trip. Some stats:
2,298 miles covered
Estimate 2,200 of which with the roof down
9 fill ups
£529 on fuel (using 98 octane)
30.2 MPG
0 issues at all. No EMLs, no limp-home modes. Izzy was perfect from the first mile to the last.
Oh, also 7.3 GAJILLION squished bugs on the front bumper and number plate when I got home and 3 times I cleaned the windscreen with quick detailer.
Reflection:
Would I do it again? Yes, definitely
Would I do it again in the Z3? Probably not. Izzy performed faultlessly. But that many hours cracking along at 80-85mph with the roof down was getting quite tiring, even with the wind deflector. And I couldn't live with myself to be in a convertible but have the roof up while the weather was so nice. Also not having cruise control was a real pain on such open and empty roads. I hate being around other cars when there is only a really small difference in speed or they are not maintaining speed and you end up yo-yoing around them, and I am very aware that was probably my fault on a few occasions this time. Finally we did manage to pack everything we wanted, but it was tight, and there was no chance of stocking up on duty free before coming home.
What's the plan next time? Mrs B is quite sure we'll fly next time. I think I probably owe it to her to let her have her way, and I expect that when we're queuing to board the aircraft, or sat with no leg-room, or even more limited with luggage, she'll say that we should drive the next time
. But I think the next time we do drive I'll take the 5-Series and we'll use the Eurotunnel both ways. I think we could do the drive in two days, or if she is willing to drive, a single 24hr run and I'll try to grab 40 winks while she does a stint in the driver's seat.
If you made it this far, thank you for reading I hope you enjoyed it
John
We decided to try the UK-Spain ferry on the way out, and we'd come home driving all the way to Calais and then Eurotunnel. If this was to become a more frequent occurrence we'd learn which method we preferred.
Despite the Italy trip a few weeks earlier, this was the first time I got to properly use the tailored bag set. They were brilliant and also with them stuffed there was still a little room at the sides and on top for some small/soft items:
So we started off with a Sunday afternoon bimble down to Portsmouth, M1-M42-M40-A34-M27. Sun out and roof down. Quite a nostalgic journey actually since Mrs B and I briefly lived in Didcot and would often travel between there and Matlock/Sheffield to visit friends and family, so we knew that route very well, but hadn't done it in over a decade. Once through customs and into the holding lanes for the ferry, to my surprise I spotted another Z3 in the adjacent lane and a few cars ahead. The driver spotted me too and we had a quick chat. James was an English guy living in Portugal and had come back to the UK specifically to buy that car! it was an Atlanta Blue 2.8 pre-facelift and looked like with a bit of TLC would be a lovely motor. I mentioned the forum to him.
First 200 miles done and Izzy still looking reasonably clean!
The ferry was an interesting experience. I have been terribly seasick on smaller boats before, but I was hopeful that a bigger boat with stabilisers (and a bar) I'd be ok. I think regular seafarers would say the conditions were calm, but there was a definite slow rolling motion. I wasn't sick, but it was enough to make me feel a little dizzy. And sadly it was enough to put me off the bar! But 30-odd hours later we pulled into a cool and very drizzly Bilbao. We ended up alongside James again in the queue for Spanish customs, and in fact we stayed in a loose convoy for most of the way to Madrid. Would this be the only other Z3 I'd see for the whole trip...?
The first leg of the journey saw us travel all the way from the north to (almost) the south coast of Spain. Going via Zaragoza would have been marginally shorter journey, however we'd be going a lot of that way on the way home, so we decided to go southbound via Madrid instead. 534 miles arriving at the villa we were staying in at about 6pm. I am absolutely in love with Spanish motorways! The section from Madrid to Albacete in particular was a dream, silky smooth, straight, impressive scenery and almost completely empty, the only thing I was missing was cruise control, which I think I am right in saying can't even be retrofitted to my car (M52B28TU)
After we had cleared Bilbao and the rain had stopped, we had the roof down for the rest of the way. Towards the latter part of the journey there were some very big dark clouds around, and another friend who happened to be around that part of the world on a road-trip holiday of his own had to take shelter from what he said was the worst hail storm he'd ever seen. But we got lucky and missed it all. Phew! I'm not sure if a soft-top is better or worse for surviving euro-hail storms? I don't really want to find out!We did have a strange happening on the way down, a guy in an Ocado-style delivery van came flying up behind me while I was passing somebody on a 2-lane stretch of motorway, right on my back bumper and flashing his lights. I'd usually get my toe down and get out of their way when I saw someone approaching so fast but to show just how quickly he arrived I'd not even seen him until he was already on me, anyway I got out of his way as quick as I could and gave him the most distained glare I could muster as he came alongside, when he starts frantically signaling at me that something was hanging off the car! I couldn't see, hear or feel anything, gauges were all normal, so we pulled over to the hard shoulder on the next sliproad and had a look. I couldn't see anything hanging off (or missing), none of the body panels, undertray or arch liners were loose, so we carried on. For the rest of the trip nobody else tried to signal us, there were no scrapes or knocks. I think this guy was just annoyed that I'd had the audacity to be on the road at the same time as him and wanted to panic me. What's the spanish for k***head?.
I'll not recount the stay in Alicante since this post is mainly about the journey, but we had a lovely time eating and drinking everything in sight. I drove down to the beach one morning, but decided after some of the crazy local Spanish roads, poorly marked junctions (or just not marked at all), random roundabouts and giant pot-holes, that I would park Izzy up and let her rest ahead of the return journey! I got a nice photo though to mark the most southerly part of the journey and probably the furthest that car has ever been from home... so far!
Our journey home was spread across 3 days, our first night stop was just outside Barcelona, and the second was in Dijon, France. I picked these for no other reason than that they looked to break the journey up quite evenly, and the Dijon route would keep us well away from Paris - I have history with the Parisian periphiques!
The most direct route up to Barcelona was to head away from Alicante to the north, cut across the Benidorm peninsula, hit Valencia from the south and then track north-east up the coast. However there was an opportunity I couldn't miss - many years ago I trained to be a commercial pilot, and the first 3-4 months of flight training I did was from a small airfield just outside Valencia called Requena. For any aviation-geeks this is where we did all the VFR flying and got the equivalent of a PPL licence. I haven't been back there since I completed my VFR training in April 2009, so I wanted to go back, have a look around and reminisce. It was so cool to be back there and see how much it had changed (and in other ways not changed at all) and also made me feel so old that it was 16yrs ago, but only felt like 2-3yrs had passed. I would highly recommend it to anyone in the area, even if you're not into aviation, there is a really lovely cafe.
(Closest I could find to the same angle 16yrs prior...
Nostalgia over and another nice Z3 postcard picture for the collection, we got back on the motorway and headed down the hill into Valencia and then up the coast to Barcelona. It was definitely busier than the in-land motorways, but still dead by UK standards. I was hoping it was going to be really picturesque with the sea on one side and mountains on the other, but it was pretty boring industrial units or plantations on both sides. Our hotel was on the far side of Barcelona, and I had imagined the motorway would be some sort of nice bypass - I was wrong. It was a motorway, but one that ran right through the city, very busy and hectic, towered over by buildings and in and out of tunnels and tight bends - it reminded me of the Aston Expressway, but with fewer Brummies.
Also Google Maps let me down entirely when the motorway split but was not shown on the map, sod's law dictated that I chose the wrong side and we watched as our car went one way while the blue line went the other - but it would not re-route and for about 3 miles I was paralysed with indecision as sliproads flew past and Google Maps said nothing. At one point it told me to take the next junction, but weirdly it was on the left side of the road, 5 lanes of traffic over and only about 50 metres ahead of where I was, so that wasn't going to happen, and then it took another minute or two to get its bearings again! Thankfully this time it told us to keep going as we were and only added about 15 mins to the ETA!
400 miles in total, one of the shorter legs of the trip in terms of mileage, but one of the longest in time after the detour to Requena took us along some beautiful, but slow and very twisty roads.
The suburb of Barcelona we were in was called Premia de Mar, we took a walk down to the marina and had some food while we decided which yacht we'd buy when we won the lotto. I picked this one:
But then I changed my mind when I remembered about the seasickness. Maybe we'll just buy one and keep it in the marina. They had a supermarket, WiFi and an Amazon locker - what more would I need?
Walking back to the hotel I saw my SECOND Z3 of the trip!! Consider yourself papped, señor/señora!
The next day was our penultimate day on the road and saw us travel from Barcelona to Dijon, 506 miles taking us along the Mediterranean coast into France and to Montpellier and then turning north past (actually through) Lyon where we had our first traffic jam since arriving on the continent, and then into Dijon. Looking at the route now on Google Maps, it looks like we used the A9, then A7, then A6, but they were just merges rather than intersections since actually on the road, we had barely left Barcelona when the next instruction on the satnav was along the lines of "in 650km, take the exit" which made me chuckle.
Our final day on the road took us from Dijon to Calais for the Eurotunnel, and then from Folkstone back to Matlock (580 miles). It was a pretty uneventful journey with one terrifying exception....
I'll not need to point this out to you lot, but the fuel tank is annoyingly small in the Z3, and with the roof down and cracking along at European motorway speeds, I was filling up every 300 miles. With this being the last leg, I was constantly doing fuel-maths in my head as we went along, and I reckoned that if I filled up within about 150km of Calais, I might just about make it home on that tank of fuel and not have to stop again - especially if I could coax Mrs B to sleep - her bladder is usually our Achilles heel when it comes to long journeys and I hate stopping unless it's for fuel
. We were just over 200km away when the fuel light came on and I watched the range ticking down on the OBC faster than we were travelling (if that makes sense). I've already made a thread about the remaining range and the OBC, and I know theoretically there must be about 50 miles left even when then OBC reads zero - but I have never tested it, and on the last day of a holiday, abroad, with wife, luggage and heading to the Eurotunnel - it was not the time to be testing it out. The OBC said I had 21 miles range left, and we were approaching one service station, but there was a sign for another in 30km which would have maybe been the difference between making it home on the next tank and not. So I pushed on! To my horror, as we pulled into the next services, there was no fuel and the OBC range had just gone to "---"! And it turns out the next services were closed (Monday was a bank holiday in France!). I couldn't believe it. I found the closest petrol station I could but it was still 20km away. We made it, but those 20km were the most horrible and nerve-racking 20mins I have endured in a long time!!And so we made it home on Monday evening after a hugely successful trip. Some stats:
2,298 miles covered
Estimate 2,200 of which with the roof down
9 fill ups
£529 on fuel (using 98 octane)
30.2 MPG
0 issues at all. No EMLs, no limp-home modes. Izzy was perfect from the first mile to the last.
Oh, also 7.3 GAJILLION squished bugs on the front bumper and number plate when I got home
and 3 times I cleaned the windscreen with quick detailer.Reflection:
Would I do it again? Yes, definitely
Would I do it again in the Z3? Probably not. Izzy performed faultlessly. But that many hours cracking along at 80-85mph with the roof down was getting quite tiring, even with the wind deflector. And I couldn't live with myself to be in a convertible but have the roof up while the weather was so nice. Also not having cruise control was a real pain on such open and empty roads. I hate being around other cars when there is only a really small difference in speed or they are not maintaining speed and you end up yo-yoing around them, and I am very aware that was probably my fault on a few occasions this time. Finally we did manage to pack everything we wanted, but it was tight, and there was no chance of stocking up on duty free before coming home.
What's the plan next time? Mrs B is quite sure we'll fly next time. I think I probably owe it to her to let her have her way, and I expect that when we're queuing to board the aircraft, or sat with no leg-room, or even more limited with luggage, she'll say that we should drive the next time
. But I think the next time we do drive I'll take the 5-Series and we'll use the Eurotunnel both ways. I think we could do the drive in two days, or if she is willing to drive, a single 24hr run and I'll try to grab 40 winks while she does a stint in the driver's seat.If you made it this far, thank you for reading
I hope you enjoyed itJohn
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