“Send me a My Turn column only if something interesting happens,” said Editor Satch when I told him about our 5,387-mile winter drive to and from Toronto and Tucson, on a January to March workation.
Fortunately, nothing interesting happened. But during our week-long drives, Bev Wellman and I realized that boring could be wonderful. After all, unlike the Roundel’s hero writers, most of us drive routine lives. We certainly drive a routine car—for a Bimmer: YOFI 2, a 2009 E90 328 AWD with automatic transmission and a non-turbo straight six. So while reading the Roundel brings out the Walter Mitty in Bev and me, this is about long distance driving for the rest of us.
SEATS: Despite the long drives and long days, we never got tired. We drove 500 to 600 miles per day, almost all on Interstates. Bev and I rotated two hour shifts, for 8 to 10 hours per day. The seats were plain-vanilla, without side bolstering, but they supported us well. No backaches. The heavier E90 made for a smoother ride than our previous 1990 E30 325iX. Our one complaint: the headrests did not rotate forward for better support, unlike the E30’s.
HEADLIGHTS: Our standard xenon headlights were much better for seeing at night than our E30’s halogen lights.
TIRES: Because we started and finished in cold Ontario, and drove inevitably through the upper Midwest (Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky), we used our Yokohama IceGuard snow tires for the entire trip. We averaged 140-150 kph (87-93 mph) in West Texas (going along with the flow of traffic-mostly Ford F-150 pickups), and we were only a bit slower (130 kph, 81 mph) for the rest of the trip. Yet, our tires were fine: no sign of heat build-up or chunking, and they were reasonably quiet. The ride was pretty good, although less nimble than our E30 had been. But we even got through Terrible Toledo Twisties, part of a long stop-and-go construction zone (with few workers) in northern Ohio. We cursed and wondered if the thousands of stuck vehicles were unanticipated correlates of Governor Kasich’s bragging in presidential debates about cutting Ohio’s budgets, and apparently road work.
MILEAGE: We’ve never been happy with our BMWs’ mileage around Toronto but figured that’s the cost of Bimmerhood. Mileage was great on the road. We did one fill-up per 500-mile day. We used name-brand gas, mostly Shell 91/93, as we were afraid of off-brands on this long trip. (We did notice that off brands had greatly proliferated since the last time we had driven cross-country in 1998.)
En route, we were saddened at the complete absence of solar panels along usually sunny I-10 in Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. And there was only one cluster of windmills in windy West Texas. These empty lands could be put to productive energy-generating use. We wondered if solar and wind power were being blocked by oil interests.
CANADIANS’ GAS PUMP TRICK FOR THE U.S.: When gas pumps ask you to punch in your non-existent zip codes, you can almost always fool them by using the three numbers from your postal code plus two zeroes. For example, M4Z 1B3 becomes 41300.
GOODBYE TO THE STICK: Although we had driven only stick-shift Bimmers from our 1974 2002 to our 1990 E30 325 (which lasted until 2013), we opted for a more boring automatic in our current E90. We know this goes against the Roundel gospel—and the empirically grounded advice of Mike Miller—but most of our driving is local, and we were tired of endlessly shifting in stop-and-go traffic. We believe Mike’s cautions that our automatic won’t last as long as a standard transmission, but it was fine for our long-distance interstate cruising. We only missed the stick on expressway ramps. Mashing the pedal to the floor to downshift was just like in my father’s Rocket 88 Oldsmobile, but it got the job done.
PAINT: Driving east through New Mexico on the I-10 was exciting in unanticipated ways. We went through sandstorms—duly warned by NM road signs—and we discovered that tumbling tumbleweeds was more than a Roy Rogers song. The tumbleweeds were like giant, lattice-work hopping balls, going right across the highway. They bounced off of our sides, if we weren’t quick enough to drive behind them. Yet, our original Blue Water/clear coat paint held up great.
APPS: We used Google Maps on our laptop to plot our next day’s route. Our 5-year old Garmin GPS helped us find the exact location of our motels, although it was fairly stupid. Have GPSs’ gotten better? The Shazam iPhone app was great for playing Name That Tune—it should be built into every radio. We used iExit to answer the question: Where is the next Starbucks? (They are pretty sparse through Alabama and Mississippi, where the Waffle House is endemic.) iExit tells you the names of the restaurants and gas stations within a mile or so of each exit, with little mini-maps and links to the restaurants’ websites. We were saddened that Mississippi’s Welcome Rest Stop near Meridian had nothing about civil rights in their history display, but enjoyed viewing Mississippi’s (and Alabama’s) lovely license plates.
Our most important apps were paper-based. AAA state maps gave us the big picture as well as guidance through the big cities. The AAA state Tour Guide books helped us to find the right restaurant and motel in the right town. But AAA’s travel advice was useless when we had to navigate off of the I-10 to bypass the Sabine River flood at the Texas-Louisiana border—despite our having “Concierge Service”. We missed BMW CCA’s former app: Friends of BMW. The national office says that it’s been deleted for privacy reasons.
FEW BIMMERS ON THE ROAD: We had never appreciated until now how many of the mostly 4-door pickups (especially Ford F-150s) were actually passenger vehicles, without any sign of being their used for work. Just as I discussed in the August 2015 My Turn, we never saw a BMW, Benz, Porsche or Audi outside of big cities—except for 2 Benz GLK SUVs in New Mexico.
SUPPORT: The only excitement was a yellow caution light after lunch in Arkadelphia, Arkansas. We used 411 to find BMW of Little Rock, drove east a nervous hour, and they graciously took us in. We learned that our failed DTML pump was necessary only for telling the environmental sensor that our gas tank was properly sealed. We had the option of ignoring it and driving 1,100 miles home while wondering if the continuing caution light would be telling us something more serious. Or, we could stay at the spanking new premises of the dealership and fix it. A no-brainer: it would have to be fixed sometime, so Little Rock dealt with it while we enjoyed their hospitality and played in the showroom with an i8 and a new-model 750iL.
The most important part of the trip is that it was boring. Indies AutoTrend in Toronto and Little Germany in Tucson prepped our car well. Our E90 did what it was supposed to do, except for the less nimble handling. Maybe the Bridgestone DriveGuards we’re putting on today will improve that, supposedly third-generation run flats (and yes, we are cautiously sticking with run flats in another deviation from Roundel wisdom). We’ll see when we drive 500 miles in June, Toronto to New York. But while we loved our E30 (for 22 years), and our 2002 and E21 320 before that, we just enjoy our E90. Yet, as Bilbo Baggins once said, the important thing is that we went there again and back—almost without incident. Boring can be beautiful, sometimes.
