supersonic feet

In time for my road trip around Europe, I should be getting some HID lights for my Alfa shortly. Thanks to a group buy on an Alfa Romeo forum, my name’s down for a set at £110 including postage.

A few members have already installed test units with success, so it should be cool and I’ll finally be back to the excellent light produced by Xenons that I got used to with my Accord Type-R. I’m not looking forward to having to fit them (and then adjust them for driving in Europe) though.
The road trip is also now all sorted, with ferry and hotels booked across Europe and the following route planned out:

1. Ferry from Newcastle to Amsterdam (overnight)
2. Spend a morning in Amsterdam then drive the 300 miles to Lampertheim in West Germany, where there appears to be nothing of interest, but it gets us close to Mulhouse.
3. Next day, drive to Mulhouse and check out the Schlumpf Collection car museum. Spend the night in Mulhouse.
4. Drive from Mulhouse, through Switzerland, to Cadenabbia on the shores of Lake Como in Italy. We get two nights by the lake which should be great for some scenic photos and chilling out after our blitz through Europe to get there.
5. After a couple of days at Lake Como, we head down to Modena for a couple of days, including a day spent with The Maserati Club visiting the Maserati factory and Panini museum (the old Maserati factory collection) among other things. Can’t wait for this.
6. After our stay in Modena, we head along the Italian Riviera and into the French Riviera (just) for a couple of days in Menton. Menton itself should be cool, but its position also allows us to easily visit near-by places of interest like Monte Carlo.
7. From Menton, we head along to Nîmes, with the world’s most complete Roman amphitheatre and a rather large Roman aqueduct, among other Roman stuff.
8. After a night in Nîmes, we move onto our next major reason for going on the trip - the Millau Viaduct. This is the tallest vehicle-carrying bridge in the world and looks stunning. We’re staying the night in Millau itself, which sits in the gorge below the bridge and should get us some great views.
9. From Millau, we go further West and North a bit, to Limoges where we hope to visit the Gouffre de Padirac - a huge underground river/cave system. This should be another great photo opportunity
10. The next day, we head up to Le Mans, where we’ll be able to check out the old town as well as (of course) the racing circuit of the famous 24 Heures du Mans race (Le Mans 24-hours).
11. From Le Mans, we cross back to the East of France and Reims. This is more just a stop-point, but there are the Champagne houses to check out while we’re there.
12. From Reims, we move up to Brussels as the last stop before our ferry home. I definitely want to check out the Atomium while we’re there as it looks mad, though my brother Leo reckons it’s boring inside.
13. After a night in Brussels, we finally make our way back to Amsterdam and the overnight ferry back to Newcastle.

It should be a great trip as long as we handle the driving OK.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 31st, 2006 at 1:17 pm and is filed under Cars, Holiday, Road Trip. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.