By Johnny Lucas (first published in Driven Magazine, Decemeber 2005)
This is the trip Napoleon would have done if he could have. Sadly, the Emperor never had it so good. When he was busy conquering
Europe
he had to sleep in tents.
If you’ve read the previous issue of DRIVEN (yes, you’re supposed to read the magazine, not just look at the pictures) you know that our travel features are going to be about trips you can actually do. So my mission in going to
Germany
,
France
,
Switzerland
and
Italy
(in the hottest BMW I have ever seen) was to come back with a trip experience that is going to be great for readers to do next year. Hard work for sure, and I expect zero sympathy for my efforts.
Germany
The best driving was the B500. It’s the back road through the deep dark Black Forest into
Baden-Baden
. More curves than all the supermodels in the world, nicely paved (this is
Germany
!) wide enough (this is not
Italy
!) and not much traffic. We drove the road, and arrived at our hotel just in time to impress the valets with the car and tear downstairs for a massage.
Baden-Baden
is not bad. I expected a stodgy town with octogenarians soaking themselves in the
hot springs
. This is exactly what the town has been known for ever since the waters are said to have cured Roman Emperor Caracalla’s arthritis in the 3rd century AD. The water contains a fair bit of natural lithium, so maybe he just felt better about things. It’s relaxed, interesting, historic and pretty with great restaurants and music.
France
Having been brought up on WW II movies, the idea of crossing from
Germany
to
France
without even stopping for a passport check continues to amaze me. If a pessimist tells you that the world is getting worse, just give him the freedom to drive, at his own speed and in his own time, between
Italy
,
Germany
and
France
- and the argument is over. It’s hard not to feel good about the world and yourself while driving through
Europe
and all its history knowing that your biggest concern is going to be choosing a spa service or a wine.
Burgundy
is the
province
of
France
that produces the best, but not the cheapest, wine and has escaped the tourist trap trend that has afflicted other regions such as
Provence
.
Burgundy
has been protected by the fact that the land is worth more for growing grapes than for motels or urban sprawl. The roads are fine, of course, and the wine towns are so close that you can walk or bike through them easily. Nuits-St.-George, Savigny-Les-Beaune, Pommard, Mersault, Puligny-Montrachet, Rully – is that a wine list or a route for a bike ride? (It’s both.)
Beaune is a nice, small city, but the best of
Burgundy
is its small villages, chateaux sitting on tops of hills, serene abbeys and idiosyncratic villages. Like its wine,
Burgundy
does not have the “biggest” anything. When we were there we spent a day driving the small roads, dropped in at an ancient, hidden, peaceful Cistercian abbey and an historic chateau. We had about 300 equally good other choices.
The Italian Error
What we did here was a mistake. Not the going to
Italy
part of it,
Italy
is wonderful. How we got there was wrong. Beaune to Bellagio is possible in a day’s drive, but just barely. We aggravated the situation by not taking the shortest route through the Alps (the Mont Blanc Tunnel) and then we made it worse by asking Helmtraud for the shortest route to Bellagio (our Italian destination). We should have asked Helmtraud for the fastest route.
Helmtraud
Allow me to introduce Helmtraud. This is the name we gave the guidance system of the car. If you’ve ever been spooked by a vehicle that is able to tell you in a soft voice “the door is ajar,” you will fall victim to Helmtraud’s charms.
Through the miracle of GPS, the car always knew exactly where we were. When you tell it where you want to go, it asks if you want the shortest route, the fastest, if you’re OK with ferries and toll roads and then it draws you a map with a handy red line on it. That’s just the beginning. Helmtraud then speaks to you in a soft measured tone saying “Turn left at the next intersection,” “Take the third exit on the roundabout.” At first she spoke only German, but the obliging girl changed to English when we found the right control.
I’m really going to hear about this violation of political correctness for my next comment, but she was also the perfect woman. When you did not follow her instructions – what did she do? She got over it immediately. Without any rancour in her tone, she adjusted the route and gave alternate instructions. When we drove off in the direction opposite to what she suggested, she just calmly told us to “make a legal U-turn.” No hint that we were disappointing her, or that we had done anything wrong – she just didn’t have it in her to do that. I think of her fondly still.
We knew she needed a name and a friend in
France
suggested that we do the honour of naming the guidance system “Helmtraud” after his 80 year old mother. She was born German, spent most of her life in
France
, is a natural aristocrat and citizen of the world. I’m not expecting BMW to come out with the “Helmtraud M6” anytime soon, but the name of the guidance system became our fairly inappropriate name for the car.
Italian “roads”
Helmtraud’s shortest road to Bellagio happened to be not a motorway, but a twisted, narrow, contorted, narrow, mountainous, badly maintained, narrow, excuse for a very narrow highway.
How narrow was it? The M6 is not a slight little car, it’s 2,043 mm wide and I swear this was more than half the width of the road. This BMW has a handy little button that pulls in its side mirrors the way a cat pulls in its ears just before it swats the dog. I used this button often.
My companion tells me that road is scenic, I wouldn’t know. On one side there was an afternoon rush of oncoming Italian drivers, all of whom seem to have recently graduated from the Kamikaze School of Driving, and on the other side either a stone wall or a precipice – those, and the fear of scratching up this brand new beast, monopolized my attention. My advice on how to drive that road is this: don’t.
Ahh
,
Italy
But it was worth it to get to Bellagio. We stayed in the Grand Hotel Villa Serbelloni which is on the site of the summer villa of Pliny the Younger. Being Roman Emperor he must have had his choice of real estate. I’m not quite sure how a hotel gets to be a Grand Hotel, it might have something to do with the fact that the ceiling in our room was about three stories high.
Generations of poets have been coming to the
Italian
Lakes
to swoon over the natural beauty of the place. Rich Italians and movie stars have villas on the shores. Europeans making the Grand Tour stopped here for a season to walk in the footsteps of every one else who had come to appreciate the lakes, the food, the wine, the views and the air.
Switzerland
In Switzerland we again disobeyed Helmtraud who suggested a tunnel under the
Alps
. We went instead with the advice of my Swiss friend, Nick, who recommended we take the high road: the old cobblestone route over the
St. Gotthard
pass. This road made the B500 look like the autobahn. Not the sort of road the M6 is made for, but what an experience to climb steeply with every turn and come out into long views and alpine meadows.
I didn’t check out the great hotels that I’d like to stay at on my next trip along this route, instead I spent time with my friends Nick & Liza and enjoyed a traditional raclette dinner with them.
Our
Waterloo
Pathetic fallacy is that literary device by which the hero’s mood is manifested in the weather. The night we returned the car to BMW central was the only really lousy day of weather we had. Helmtraud functioned perfectly in the dark and stormy night. We said our sad goodbyes in the privacy of a fortified underground parking lot - and the next day I was a pedestrian in Düsseldorf. It was wrenching to part from those 500 horses and the pinnacle of fine engineering in which they are stabled. As Napoleon discovered, it’s probably too much to ask for a completely happy ending after the experience of conquering
Europe
.
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