Our Classics
Charlie sets off for Spain in his £1200 BMW – but no pressure though, just his own wedding to get to
Illustrious company
On the road
Over the border
When my fiancée and I began planning our wedding a year ago, it quickly became apparent that if we wanted to do it in the Spanish Pyrenees – where we’d found a venue we’d fallen in love with – we were going to have to bring more stuff than we could check in on a flight.
With visions of Top Gear- like cross-country cheap car challenges in my head, I soon declared that I could drive all the stuff down. I’ve done long drives to Wales, Scotland and Cornwall in my past Minis and VW Scirocco without any problems, so how much harder could it be?
Getting everything in it, including my two groomsmen, proved our first challenge. The car was filled with decorations and other wedding paraphernalia, and then all of our actual luggage in the roof box above, the thinking being that this might minimise the negative effect the weight would have on the car’s handling. The long, sweeping left hander of the M11 to M25 clockwise slip road put paid to those ideas pretty decisively. Inadvertently, I’d booked us on to the channel tunnel the weekend before Le Mans 24 Hours, which plunges the Victor Hugo terminal into chaos. At least the queue snaking through the entire site, contained some interesting cars. Classics including a C3 Corvette and E28 M5 were personal favourites, while an hour of queuing later, we found ourselves sharing a carriage on the Eurotunnel with a Ferrari FF. I don’t think our fellow passengers found the E36 Compact quite so interesting to look at – it is a car just on the tipping point of becoming a classic after all, and I’ll be the first to say it isn’t the prettiest BMW ever made. For the journey from Calais to our overnight halt near Paris I handed one of my groomsmen the keys for the first time. I’m pretty certain this is the only time I’ve ever been a passenger in my own car, and not to discredit Harry’s driving, but it’s a strange experience. Of course, I didn’t want to put Harry off, so I gave some strained smiles occasionally, but had the footwell been made of thinner steel, I would have punched a foot-shaped hole through it searching for a brake pedal at times. Thanks to all of the delays at Folkestone and traffic near Paris, we didn’t have as much time in the French capital as we had hoped, but we were at least able to satisfy the wine, cheese and bread cravings of my other groomsman, Toby, who had spent the past six months in Japan – where none of those items are particularly easy to find in any decent quality. We stopped near Limoges at the village of Bellac, on the journey south but the main thing to take away from the drive from Paris to Toulose is to simply be reminded of how large and empty France is.
As you approach the Pyrenees past Toulouse, the scenery does get considerably more dramatic. We gave Toby quite the reintroduction to driving at this point – he hadn’t driven a car for six months, and had been recovering from his reacquaintance with wine up until now – allowing him to tackle the winding switchbacks of the ascent toward Andorra, which eventually
became so restricted by fog we can’t have been doing more than 30mph. Like some kind of fantasy film, the fog dramatically receded as we passed through the Envalira tunnel, revealing the outrageously picturesque Andorra.
To be fair to the BMW, it coped with the steep mountain roads well enough – when held in a low gear it was fast enough not to hold up traffic despite all the weight on board and the temperature needle never moved from its mid-point.
Best laid plans…
We stopped for one more night in Andorra, before travelling through more tunnels to get to Spain. As we got close to our destination however, going through miles of deserted and well paved roads winding through stunning mountains, I began to notice that I didn’t recognise any of the place names nearby, despite the fact we were just an hour away.
It turns out there are two Ainetos – the village we were staying in before heading to the wedding venue – we were heading to the wrong one. Fortunately, we had still headed in the right direction, but with the correct Aineto punched into the sat-nav, our journey doubled in size, and it became apparent we were in for a late night.
All’s well
Once unburdened from all of the clobber we’d brought down with us, driving the BMW around the Pyrenees as we made preparations for the wedding and explored the area was one of the best driving experiences I’ve ever had.
The 318Ti has just enough power to be fun for a car for its weight, while the suspension strikes a good balance between compliancy for the occasional bump in the road and stiffness for the corners. Threading it through the deserted – except for herds of livestock – roads was terrific fun and I can’t recommend the area enough for someone looking for a good driving holiday. A fleet of British-registered Morgans suggested we were far from being the first to discover the area’s appeal.
Once the wedding was all done
( yes, it was good thank you, though it flew by) we tackled the drive back in a mile-crunching two stints, just as Europe fell into the grip of the summer’s first heatwave. By the end of it all, we’d done about 2500 miles in the BMW in less than two weeks. The BMW kept us in reasonable comfort, if a little cramped, with the air-con just about keeping up with the heat, and it averaged 35mpg, which isn’t bad considering how much we’d laden the car.
Crucially, the BMW hadn’t even suggested a mechanical fault. Not bad for £1200 in my book.