After what seemed like weeks of rain, we've now had two weeks of wonderful weather, cold in the mornings and at night but nice and sunny during the day.
This morning was one of the special ones with mist down below in the valley but what was really special and something I haven't seen before was a huge bank of mist over the Med. It looked like it was a grassy plain with a covering of mist (see picture left).
We've also seen Corsica on quite a few mornings but as usual, it disappeared back into the haze within minutes.
The cars have been covered in a thick frost each morning and after what seems like years of trying, I still haven't persuaded J that pouring a kettle of boiling water over the windscreen is a bad idea! With a two inch crack on the passenger side you'd think she'd never seen one of those repetitive Autoglass adverts.
Still, it's her car although if the windscreen caves in one frosty morning, it'll suddenly become my car! C'est la vie!
My newest addition however, is looking good despite the fact that the complete braking system is in the trailer, waiting to be taken to the dump. The bumpers have been repaired and re-painted and it no longer looks like a typical Cote d'Azur car. It's strange that although it's spent all of its fifteen years down here with crazy drivers, it doesn't have any of those door dings and other little bashes which virtually every vehicle down here suffers from.
The main part of the braking system hopefully is en-route from the UK and it really irked me that having bought the new disks and pads from the main car supermarket, I then found I could have got them on-line from the UK at a quarter of the cost. Luckily, I'd wandered into the local BMW service point to price the brake cailipers and fainted when the guy told me they'd be €258 - each! I got them on-line for £40 each! Still - one learns.
The electrics on the other hand are a nightmare. BMW's, even old ones like mine have a plethora of electrical gadgets and whilst the majority of them seem to be working ok, the powered convertible hood just doesn't work. There's about twenty different relays which do various things, e.g. stopping the boot from opening when the hood cover is unlocked, locking the hood cover when the boot is unlocked but I can't be bothered working my way through the relays and giving BMW a fortune and as we tend not to get sudden downpours here, which necessitates a powered hood, I'll simply rig up a new locking system.
Being a bit of a nut though, I still start the 2.8 engine every couple of days and I just sit there listening to it purring. I can't wait.
1 comment:
Those pictures are so beautiful - so nice to see pictures of somewhere that isn't just a mess of snow and ice, as it has been here for so long!
I drove my dad's new BMW the other day, and I swear, I didn't know what half the buttons were for! My car is only a 2006, but I swear, BMW must have added in at least 50 new buttons on the 2011 models! (I'm convinced they do it, so that when something breaks, you absolutely have to bring it in more often!). :) Good luck!
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