Mr. Five- Part Two: Oh Man this was a Long Trip

The car is actually faster and more comfortable than expected. It will accelerate to 100 miles per hour without very little issue. One issue of critical importance is adjusting the seats however. The car has 10-way power adjustable seats. Unfortunately this is accomplished via the most complicated and unintelligible group of buttons and switches this side of Apollo 11. There are eight buttons with arrows pointing every which way on the center council, plus extra switches on the side of the seat to adjust the power adjustable headrest and knee bolster. Ridiculous. The car can do one-hundred and fifty miles per hour without thinking, but you need a mechanical engineering degree to move your seat back 2 inches.

My father, brother and I rolled in the M5 for roughly two hours and were near the Ohio-Indiana border when the real fun began.

The day we picked up the car was astoundingly cold, and for some reason the car had run a lower than what we deemed normal reading on the temperature gauge. Keep in mind we had no idea where the gauge should have been, but all agreed that "in the middle was where it belonged." Instead of sitting correctly in the middle, the needle on the M5's temperature gauge sat just above the left hand limit near the blue side. We assumed this was not a problem? After all whose ever had this conversation:
"What happened to the car?"
"The motor underheated and blew! Damn thing nearly went through the hood it was so cold!"

In the dark on some highway in cornfed Indiana the cars coolant light started blinking with all the fury of the lost in Space Robot yelling "Danger Will Robinson!" Swinging the car over to the rapidly approaching off ramp for examination revealed little- the temperature gauge was still strongly low, but there was the correct amount of coolant in the car's overflow reservoir and nothing appeared to be leaking. Also important to note- nothing was frozen solid! Assuming it would be hard to overheat the motor in -5 degrees Fahrenheit, we decided to roll on. Heck, maybe the car was just complaining that it was too cold. We agreed!

Entering Ohio around 9:30pm we made the tactical decision to not drive to Albany in one shot and thought Cleveland would make an outstanding end point for the first day's travel. Conveniently, my father has a good friend in Cleveland who could easily be convinced to provide shelter and beer to us in exchange for a short drive of the new old BMW. Navigating suburban Cleveland at midnight on hour number 16 of the trip resulted in no less than two erroneous exits being taken, and exactly three high speed U turns. Maybe this Five Series could make a good autocross vehicle after all.

We hit our nights destination just after midnight and proceeded to immediately consume copious amounts of popcorn and Samuel Adams Boston Lager. Our host had a beautiful black lab, which oddly enough had an insatiable addiction to popcorn. When I ate popcorn, it put its head on my lap and since I am basically very uncoordinated would eventually drop lots of popcorn in the couch cushions. Then the dog would bury its head in the cushions and devour all of the popcorn. This was hilarious to us after 17 hours of travel.

Next Stop- Sleeping.