Our First BMW, it is a beamer, look it up!!

About three weeks ago we came to the realization that we will not make it as a one car family. TI is providing a company car and the plan was to use public transportation otherwise. Well, after deciding on a house that is more than walking distance and almost more than biking distance to the closest S Bahn station, factor in the rather rainy, cold, and dreary conditions often seen for most of the year; we came to the conclusion another car was in order. 

If you know us well then you know we both like making informed decisions, especially on large purchases. Cindy blames me for researching my research when looking into things like this. This time I was not needed. Cindy spent a good week staring at her computer during every free moment researching cars. We ran the gamut of large to small, diesel to electric, new and used, standard or automatic transmission. That last one was probably the key. A very large majority of the cars here are all stick shift. Many of the specific models or trim levels don't even offer an automatic option. Eventually, after much research by Cindy, she narrowed down the options to a hand full of automatic small car options. Then it was a financial decision on how much we want to spend to get a later year model, less kilometers, etc. About ten days ago we drove about 100 kilometers to a dealership in Augsberg that had what we thought was our best option. It was a nice drive up there for us, we test drove the car and made an on the spot decision that we were done, we will take it. Unfortunately we did not get to leave with it that day. There were some very small scratches and they wanted to get it detailed for delivery. I was not excited about driving there again to pick it up, but okay. The dealer told us that if we put 500 euro down payment we could take all of the paperwork that would allow us to register the car prior to picking it up this week. He did give us the option of paying 200 euro to have the dealership take care of registration. You have to go into the Munich area to register the car since we our house is within the Munich area of responsibility. We told him no thanks, and planned to get it registered. 

Once we made the down payment and left we spoke to our relocation coordinator. She told us we could not register the car until we have our housing registration done. We can't do that until we complete our residence permits for myself and the kids. Our residence appointment was on Wednesday of this week. Put the car story on HOLD.

On Wednesday morning we all got up and got ready. The kids were going to miss the morning at school and we had it all pre-approved through the school. Remember David's perfect attendance record? Well, I think it is still intact. This went down as an excused tardy. Cindy had already been to the place where we were going. She had to get her work Visa approved when we first arrived. This is a government facility where depending on who you draw they can be really easy to work with or they can make things miserable. This guy was not happy about our marriage certificate. After Cindy went several weeks ago we were told to provide an "Apostilla" confirming our status as a married couple. The certified copy from the Lubbock County Clerk's office was not enough apparently. Cindy and I have no idea where the original went, we think it was lost very early in our newlywed bliss. (Which is still going, by the way. Jealous much?) So here is the problem, you cannot get an Apostilla unless you start with an original document. This was lost in translation to this guy, even though we had our relocation coordinator there telling him all of this in German. We think we finally got past this hurdle by signing an additional document pledging that we are in fact married. Our little guy was not very efficient and not in a hurry. We told the kids they could not have any devices and they had to be on their best behavior while we were here. They about went nuts, but an hour and a half later we had our temporary residence permits and we were on our way to school. Our relocation consultant took them, along with our passports to get us registered in our city, step two. She then told us that we would register the car next Monday after we pick up the keys to the new house. This was the plan even though we had told her we were picking up the car late this week. This turned out to be a problem..............

Back to the car story: I was reminded on Wednesday that I need to get car insurance figured out prior to getting the car. We will also need a special insurance number in order to register the car. She provided me with a contact and over the course of a couple of days we figured the insurance. It was a little work, the insurance here wants to see multiple years of no claims to get some significant discounts. I was able to use my US, Dallas based internet phone number to call the two previous providers. They both sent letters of experience showing any claim history. It was easier than I thought it would be. Just a disclaimer before the rest of the story. I understand the in the end we were probably unprepared and might have been able to make this easier on ourselves. So, no excuses, I am just saying. Fast forward to Friday morning, we drop off the kids at school and head back to Augsburg (100 kilometers) to get the car. Here is the reason for the disclaimer. We left the car documents at our apartment, I had not done my homework on how much money I can take out of my bank account on a single day using my debit card, and we had not registered the car based on guidance from our relocation coordinator. Yes, we pretty much just showed up expecting to drive away with our car. The insurance agent emailed during the drive with an amended policy amount. Cindy replied while I was driving asking him to confirm that we are okay to drive the car off of the lot. It turns out in Germany there are no "dealer plates", you show up with your license plates when you pick up the car. The insurance agent called my "handy" about the time we sat down with the guy at the dealership. He explained that he cannot cover us and that we are not to drive the car without first registering the vehicle. An alternative is to have the dealer provide a red dealer plate until we can get it registered, but according to our dealer they only had one and it was for test drives only. He also explained that we could register it locally for 120 euros, good for five days, then pay another 120 euros to register again in Munich. I calculated the cost of gas and we decided that it was cheaper to drive back to Munich to register the car then return to the dealership to take delivery. We had a conversation with Elisabeth, the infamous relocation consultant, to confirm that was our best option. At one point she told Cindy to make sure she had her passport to do the vehicle registration. Cindy reminded Elisabeth that she had the passport for the residence registration and she was going to return it next week when we were scheduled to register the vehicle. All making sense? So now it was 10:30 in the morning and we understand that the vehicle registration office in southeast Munich closes at noon. We need to jump in the rental car, drive back to Freising to get the car paperwork and bank information, then drive to the vehicle registration office. Elisabeth is going to have a person meet us there to give us our proof of residence and passports. We are off.

From Augsburg to Freising we hauld booty. It was autobahn almost door to door. If you are wondering a Volvo S60 Diesel SUV tops out at about 200 kph, going slightly downhill you can get to about 208. The estimated kilometer range went from 490 kilometers to 190 during the drive, it was working hard. Luckily the traffic was pretty light as we were pretty far north and west of Munich. We make it to the apartment, grabbed the car stuff, the bank stuff, and some pringles for a snack on the road. Now was the big test. We are headed into the belly of the beast. Munich proper on the middle Friday of Oktoberfest. Well, to be honest the traffic was not that bad. We were on the outer ring and made it within 25 minutes, or around 11:35. We had no idea what to do next. The lady that was meeting us was not there yet and this was a large building. About the time Cindy called the lady to ask her what to do I found a little machine that gave me a number. There was a television showing the active numbers, we were 290 and they were serving 260. At this point we did not know if we were going to get kicked out at noon or what was going to happen next. Cindy walked up to an information desk and a nice lady went over our documentation to make sure we had everything once our number was called. Now we waited. 

The other lady showed up with our stuff and the numbers all of the sudden started going pretty rapidly. By a few minutes past noon our number was up. We walked over to the desk and the lady processed all of the paperwork. While we were waiting it was explained that there are three shops in the immediate area that we have to walk to in order to get the actual plates. I could not imagine how this process worked. They gave us a little paper credit card sized slip to put into this machine, it told us to give it 35.50 euros. Then our helper told us to walk down these stairs to this little shop. We gave them the papers. She immediately grabs the numbers and letters of our assigned license plate and put them on a template with a fresh piece of metal and proceeds to metal press the license plate right there in front of us. Then they put it in a second machine to get the black lettering and the little european union sticker with the "D" designating Germany. Within thirty seconds we paid another 35.50 and got two license plates. Now we had to take those back upstairs to another area to get the little inspection stickers and Unterschlessheim sticker and we were done. 

Thank goodness the relocation lady stuck around to help us. There is no way we could figure out the steps that needed to happen to get that done. We had time to grab a "Duren Doner" (the yummy flour tortilla wrapped pork thing that we discovered in Munich) from a stand in the parking lot and get back on the road. Now we were up against the clock to make it all the way back to Augsburg to pick up the car and get back to school by 3:30 to get the kids. About the time we arrived at the dealership, again, I remembered the whole bank thing. We wanted to just pay for the car and not go through financing stuff, but I had not done my homework yet. While Cindy talked to the dealer rep and went over the car stuff I called the bank. Eventually I learned that the maximum I could put on the debit card on a single day was 1,000 euros. That was not going to get it done. Plan B, I looked on Google maps to find a local branch of our bank. If I had to I was going to make the 20 minute drive to get cash and bring it back. Just as I was making that plan the dealer gave his input that he did not think the bank would have enough cash on hand. NOW WHAT? Well the tale ends well. I used his computer to complete an electronic transfer to the dealership's bank account. They held on to the piece of paper that is equivalent to the title in the US until the payment clears. He is going to express mail it to us early next week once it is all confirmed. Finally we get in the car to drive away..........almost. Cindy had the car on ready to go and noticed there was barely half a tank of gas. I walked back in to ask the guy about the great American tradition of the dealership filling up the tank before you drive off. He acted like he did not understand and tried to convince us that we had plenty of fuel to make it back to the Munich area. Cindy helped me explain again that it would be nice to have a full tank. He was a nice guy and gave us a little bit of a hard time, but did go get another employee to fill it up for us. I stopped short of asking him to fill up my rental car too, it was not the right time. We did have to make a stop to fill up that tank, but we were on the road again.

We made back to the school in time to see the kids playing soccer for their after school activity of Fridays. I call this "The Day Trip That Took Us Nowhere". We really did not see anything new. Just the same thing a couple of time over. We drove over 550 kilometers during the day and managed to take up the entire school day in the process. We actually discussed the possibility of checking out Oktoberfest after we picked up the car in the morning. We made it to Munich, but not for beer drinking. 

So what variety of BMW do we own? 

Yeah, I said variety. BMW owns the brand, look it up! It is a Mini One 2010 with only about 15K kilometers. It is very fuel efficient, we coverted kilometers to miles to estimate about 38 miles per gallon. Although I don't think that milage applies when it is running at 5000 RPMs and close to 200kph on the way home. Cindy had to let the car stretch her legs a little. She has been sitting in that car lot all lonesome. Alas, we will never get to drive Cindy's last car in Germany, that would have been fun. This will do to get us around town.

For the record, we had a good day. There was a time this would have frustrated the crap out of me and we would have been griping at each other the whole day. We both rolled with the process and got it done. It was still a good day.

Special Poll Question, please give you opinion in the comment section. Speaking of Oktoberfest. Cindy and I have not been to it yet. It ends on the 6th of October. Next week is CRAZY with us moving into our house and Cindy busy at work with quarter close responsibilities. I can go around the corner and get a Hofbrauhaus or any other popular German beer. I don't see the point in fighting the crowds to pay twice as much for the same beer in an atmosphere I would avoid at all costs on a normal day. If we do try to go it will be this weekend, so the kids will be with us too. Question: Is it worth it to go? If so, why?