WTF!?!? Well technically the capital is Pest but used to be Buda during the monarchy. Anyway they decided to call the place Budapest once they'd built a permanent bridge over the Danube.
Just got my Ti back after almost being charged =A3450 to park in some mafia controlled carpark... or maybe they saw a westener in a western car and thought if he's stupid enough to drive here, he's stupid enough to ay =A3450 to park here?!
I expect that's why they're still Hungary.
narrow bah i took my dad's S60 down a country lane barely big enough for it, the wheels were on the edge of either side of the road hehe, a mini came the other way and i think he was a bit intimidated by a huge S60 grille in his face and he kindly backed up :)
i'd rather have the passat, although the smart could be fun, being a rental i guess it's ok to abuse it too ;)
Steve Firth (%steve%@malloc.co.uk) wrote: : B.G. Finlay IT Services wrote: : > That's quite a drive in 3 days if you're hoping to see anything other : > than mways.
: Nah, I make it from near Winchester to 500 km south of Lake Garda in two : days driving in my FoB slow 4x4. We only need one hotel stop, Strasbourg : on the way south, Lake Como on the way back home.
Was that sticking to motorways? I've done quite a bit of touring on the bike but only use mways as a last resort ... too boring. Blair.
You don't realise just how narrow Italian village streets are. As one of the locals said to me, "This isn't an alleyway, it's a corridor". Anything wider than a Fiat Panda will not physically fit in some streets, and it's not a question of hedges like on a country lane, the boundary to the street is vertical stone walls, the walls of houses.
Mostly yes.
Yes but a bike of any sort is hardly ideal for fast long distance driving is it? I have to fill up three times on the journey, usually coinciding with leaving the ferry then lunchtime and again the next day. On a bike you'd have to stop more often and it must be dreadful having to sit hunched up all day long instead of in a big comfy armchair with cruise control.
Havng said which I've also done the journey by road using only "A" roads or equivalent. It still only takes two days, one day to get to Lyon, the second to get from Lyon to Central Italy.
oh! well i guess smarts might be cool in italy :)
I know, but Charlie says.....
We're going through France. Hopefully she'll sleep through most of Saturday so won't want to stop, but unfortunately unless I adopt a 33.5 mph cruise (or whatever) we're going to have to stop _somewhere_ for fuel... :-x
soooooooo under the thumb! regardless of what dervy says :)
in news: snipped-for-privacy@individual.net, "DanTXD" slurred :
I might have imagined him driving *over* a smart....
Heh, SWMBO mentioned to day that one of the cars that we both really liked was my old Citroen Visa 652cc. It was a brilliant car, you needed to be one hell of a driver to get it to go anywhere but that was all part of the fun.
I\ve just got back from Italy, I hope that Derv is OK, because driving conditions were a tad extreme. On Friday the weather was fine, but by Sunday night a storm had started over almost all of Italy. The area around Milan was reported to be badly affected.
We had a flash flood, and on Tuesday when we set out to the local DIY place we had to turn back, because after driving down from the top of our mountain the road into the city was under about 3ft of water, or a meter as we say over there.
This morning it was obvious from the mountains that (a lot of) fresh snow had fallen, it was down to about 3,000ft. Fortunately for us the house is just below that so we got to the airport OK.
[snip]
And indeed "oh dear" is about the best I can manage. We got the keys to a Smart ForFour CDi "Automatico". First problem, the boot isn't actually big enough for a suitcase. So it took several minutes with the handbook to find out how to fold the back seat forwards. It's not obvious, and I was really glad I read Italian. It ends up as four separate movements. First slide the seat all the way forward. The handle for this is in the boot. What? Why isn't it under the seat like it is for the front seats?
Next fold the seat backs forward onto the seat cushion. Easier than it sounds, no sign of a handle anywhere. I'm used to handles at the top of the seat back or at the outside of the seat, the Smart has a weird doohickey buried between the seats one for each side so you need to find the lever press it down all the way (takes the strength of an ox) and at the same time fold the seat back forward. The button pressing needs to be done from inside the passenger compartment. Now back to the boot, grab a big, cheap looking wire handle, pull and the seat folds up.
Except it didn't because it only works if the front seats are a long way forward. Sorted that, loaded suitcase, on our way.
It's a short drive from the airport to the supermarket so the first thing we did was shopping. Oh dear, no cover for the load space. Bags on show to everyone. Including the light-fingered illegals who hand around the carpark trying to sell crap you don't want and lifting bags and wallets if they can't sell anything.
Threw a raincoat over the lot and hoped. Survived.
Next onto the motorway. And here things took a real turn for the worse. Nice sunny day, aircon on, because with that huge sunroof it was getting hot fast. Collected the ticket at the toll booth, onto the slip road, foot down to match speed with the traffic and... and... nothing. There's no bloody acceleration at all, it's godawful. Bags of bugger, lots of all. Eventually we managed to get up to 50km/h and had to pull onto the motorway then sit there as trucks zipped past waiting for the engine to gather oomph. It revved up to 4,000 rpm then just as we seemed to be getting somewhere, huge lurch and it changed up a gear. And the acceleration died again. Eventually, and I mean eventuallly, about two junctions later, it got up to 120 km/h. Then we met a hill and had to stick to the crawler lane to get to the top.
Back home it was even worse. The car grounded on the humps in the road and was stranded like a Beetle (no one with six legs) rocking about and going nowhere. Trip to the local supermarket which has an entrance that runs down to the street wuite steeply saw us almost lose the front spoiler. Next time I tried to avoid the drop by sticking to the right where there seemed more tarmac and the sump graunched across the road. Horrible.
I wish I could find something nice to say about it, but it was horrible. The interior colour is horrid, it's too slow to catch a cold, the "A" posts are far too big, at junctions you cannot see the opposite carriageway at all. It's best to wind down the window and listen for cars. On mountain roads on left hand bends I couldn't see oncoming traffic which considering Italians have a tendency to drive on the wrong side of the road means that it's just bloody dangerous.
My wife made me promise never, ever to get one again.
Nah under the thumb and loving it, she's the main earner these days.
Yah I heard that too. We departed from Italy on the Tuesday in the rain. There had been stacks of snow above Lake Garda and the locals were doing funky stuff like putting their televisions upstairs. We thought them barking mad, the lot of them, but on the way back it rained and rained and rained and rained... :-/
Ouch!
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