So I picked up my 530i sport in Munich on Sept 14. I can say the overall trip was awesome. However, it did not go completely smoothly.

I flew from Seattle on Sept 13 and arrived in Munich on Sept 14 around 8am in the morning. I waited a good 45mins at baggage pickup before finding out from Lufthansa that United had lost my luggage! When I booked the 2 for 1 tickets, Lufthansa booked us on a United flight. Big Mistake! The bad part was we had booked a hotel in Reims France the same day that I was arriving in Munich. I was planning to pick up my ED 530i sport, and drive directly to Reims France. Since I was planning to drive to Paris on Sept 15, we had to tell Luftthansa to route our bags to our Paris hotel.

Needless to say when we finally got to Paris, our bags were not there. Some how, that did not surprise me. United is terrible. We called United in Germany and Paris, and they were worthless. Apparently, United does not have an automated baggage tracking system. They did not know where our bags where! I had to call United back in the USA to get just a little bit of traction. Finally, on Sept 17, 2 days after we got to Paris we finally got our bags. Long story short, I recommend flying on an actual Lufthansa flight instead of United, these people are incompetent.


So enough ranting, more about the ED pickup :-)

So I took a taxi from Munich to the ED pickup center, took about 20 minutes or so. The driver was friendly, he asked if I was picking up a BMW. I said yes, and then he started to say how he wanted to import a Ford Mustang to Germany

The ED pickup center is non-descript, and not a real exciting place. Anyway, I got a guy called Ernst who delivered my 530i sport to me. He was real helpful with directions, though not real experienced with the 530i he was delivering to me.

Anway, I did not get NAV, so while in the parking lot of the ED center I pulled out my HP Pocket PC and got TomTom running. I affixed my Pocket PC to a windsheild mount I brought with me, and my GPS got a lock pretty quickly. So now I was headed on a 6.5 hour trip to Reims France. Man, the Autobahn is smoooooth. I could not really slam my new 530i hard, but I could feel that the engine is butter smooth. Felt even smoother than my wife's Lexus and it was extremly quiet on the highway, on par with my wife's Lexus. Once on the Autobahn, I felt there was some vibration in the front end of the car, but after about 30 minutes of driving it went away. I suspect the car had been sitting on some lot of over 30 days, which probably caused the tires to deform a bit. I had to consiscouly keep the car under 160km/h. Trust me it was hard to do, as alot of cars were going much faster. Also the 530i is so smooth you do not realize how fast you are going. I finally figured out via iDrive that I could set a speed alarm, so I set it for 150km\h. So no weverytime I hit 150km\h an alarm sounded, neat

Anyway, about 5 hours into the trip, I was starting to feel real tired. I had not slept for over 24 hours. Luckily, my wife had a good nap in the car , so she took over for the last 1.5 of the drive to France. Anyway, we got to Reims and had a good nights sleep and headed off to an outlet mall outside of Paris to get a change of clothes the next day, as we had no luggage. Anway, I forgot the name of the outlet mall, but it was nicer than the outlet mall I've seen in the US. Its got all the big name brands you can of, and more. This place was huge. We then dropped off the car at the Paris airport. We bumped into another ED couple that was also dropping off a grey 530i at the TT drop off center. Anyway, the TT drop off center was non-descript, so we sort of circled around the airport for around 20 minutes before we found it.

We stayed 3 nights in Paris, and then took the Eurostar to London. We spend another 2 nights in London and then flew out from London on the Sept 20.

Overall, awesome trip. We saw alot of amazing sights in Paris and London, and highly recommend ED to anyone.