Nice

Posting this just after the unbelievable and tragic collapse of the Morandi motorway bridge in Genoa on 14th August 2018.
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Working for Inchcape plc's car sales division, Mann Egerton, as European Audit Manager based at home in Munich with an office in Dortmund and units spread from Kiel on the Danish border to Nice in France.

Only BMW in the five German sites, Lexus, Toyota, Suzuki in Luxembourg, BMW, Rolls Royce and Lotus in Paris, VW in Toulouse and Nice. A mixed bag but made for some interesting sites and experiences for the relatively short period I did it before being yanked out of luxury and sent to the misery of the former East German run down cities of Halle and Dessau to build and manage two brand new, greenfield, without a field or plan,  BMW garages. ME! - who had learnt hotel management! Another story for another day.

Visiting such wonderful places on business trips is seldom as grand as it seems: Fly airport to airport, taxi to the office, taxi to the hotel, taxi to the office, taxi to the airport and fly home. Could be almost anywhere.

Normally I would fly to Paris, Toulouse, Nice and even Hamburg but today I had decided to take a leisurely, lovely autumnal, 850km, 10 hour drive from Munich crossing over the Alps at Innsbruck and cruising down the Brenner across the plains of northern Italy past Milan and then to the coast at Genoa before the spectacular coastal road along the Italian and French Rivieras to Nice.

The bridge that collapsed on 14th August 2018 was of course on the route. Directly above the city, I was less interested in the bridge's structure than the wonderful view it gave of the port and the welcoming Mediterranean.

The Blip was taken after this, somewhere on the Riviera coast road just after exiting one of the multitudes of tunnels. I had taken the photo as the car ahead had just overtaken me in the tunnel (I have proof in the form of a blurred photo taken in the tunnel) and although clearly a BMW it didn't look like any model I had seen. To me, it was a 7 series estate and certainly BMW themselves had never manufactured one.

(In retrospect I wonder how on earth I was so quick as to take a photo with an analogue camera while driving a moving car. Smartphone cameras hadn't been dreamt of in 1991)

I didn't risk stepping on the accelerator (I was in a BMW 5) so as to check it out. Exceeding the speed limit in Italy can be very expensive at best and downright ruinous at worst - confiscating cars is a favourite past time of the Carabinieri.  So I assumed it was a "conversion" job by one of the many such businesses in northern Italy.

Once past Monaco and the border, I found the central luxury hotel in Nice before dark but no longer had the energy for a stroll on the promenade. That came later together with a lovely evening drive and meal in nearby Cannes. I think the only piece of memorabilia that I brought home from the trip (I had a large empty car boot) were a Microwave and a Moulinex Mixer on special offer at a supermarket in Nice where I stopped to buy snacks for the homeward drive. I still have the Moulinex and I suspect the Microwave still exists in my last office near Munich where I "donated" it around 2003 to our 10-people makeshift office kitchen. And I still have both recipe books that came with the machines, neither of which I have ever used as they are in French and I am too lazy to take the trouble to interpret! The instructions were also only in French back in those days before the EU insisted on 28 different language bibles being issued with all equipment. (Pinch of salt needed and ask if it isn't the manufacturers who do this to save cost)

I have placed the Geotag at a tunnel shortly before the Italian French border. I can't remember exactly where it was taken.