BMW Welt

Daryll writes:

We’ve spent the last few days with Paul and his lovely wife Kathy and they have been absolutely incredible with their hospitality – another one of our extended families.  Even though just returning from a weekend trip to Berlin, Paul has made the time to show us around Munich and some of the smaller towns in the area to see the sights.  Germany is such a beautiful country and each day as we travel around by car, I wish I had our bikes with us as the roads are amazing, especially the smaller country roads.  No potholes insight and some nice twisties.  Well next time!  The country side is lush with trees and agriculture and there are quaint little villages as far as the eye can see.  There is so much history in this country that a few weeks isn’t enough to see everything and we would have to come back.  The people we have met are just so nice and if I could only speak the language, would definitely rank high on somewhere were I’d settle.  Spanish was so much easier to pick up listening to other’s, but German is another story all together.



 

No trip to Munich is completed without a tour of the BMW Museum, BMW World and the BMW Munich plant.  Paul used to work for BMW and arranged everything for us.  I was like a kid leading up to Christmas for a few days prior to us visiting BMW World and boy was it impressive.



We started in the Museum and even though the motorcycle part of the museum was closed due to some flood damage a few days prior, it was impressive.  From seeing the Art Car’s painted by world famous artists to some of the cars from yester-year to the Hydrogen Car, it was impressive.


 

Our next stop was a tour of part of the Munich Manufacturing Plant to see how the cars are built.  It was incredible to see all those robots moving around in such close quarters and handing parts to other robots to perform the tasks that they are programmed to do.  As you would expect, no photography was permitted.  As we walked through each of the different stages in the manufacturing process, I didn’t imagine the scale of production and the output of such plants.  Even Angela enjoyed the 2 hour tour.  It’s something that I won’t forget – thanks Paul!  We were also fortunate to meet Paul’s and Kathy’s children (Claudia & Tobias) for dinner.  Tobias has in my opinion the best job in the world – he is an engineer and developer for the motorcycle division with BMW.  Part of his job is to test out the parts that he has designed and every so often will get new bikes to ride.  He is leaving on a 3 week trip to the UK in about a weeks time on a 1200RT – tough life.  I hope that some day the entire family travels to Canada so that we can show them part of our country.