BMWLand

The good lady Mrs W and myself spent a few hours at the Cheltenham branch this morning, thought I'd drop a review on here. The dealership is MASSIVE. It includes BMW, Mini and bikes, so covers a huge site. The salesman that we met told us it was the second largest in the country, Sheffield has a larger dealership.
Lovely place to spend some time, really friendly staff, and the car collection is incredible. There are many M cars (another thread on that one....) as well as more usual stuff, but there is also a pretty extensive collection of classic BMWs.
The site is on three levels, ground/basement is the workshop, first is the main sales area and then there is a 2nd floor which houses many of the classic cars. When I say classic, I mean older gen cars. We saw:
Original 1960s Mini Cooper
1974 3.0CSL, stunning car in silver
Two Z8s, these just get better looking by the year
An F82 GTS (had the wrong wheels on)
An individual E92 M3
An E60 M5, immaculate in every respect
An E30 325i...

Just returned from a few days up the The Lakes with my two sons. We decided it would be great to revisit Little Langdale as two of us did this time last year.
Dad (me) treated us to the hotel, meals etc, two nights at The Three Shires, same place I stayed last year when I met my youngest for a walk.
My eldest got the train up to my house on Saturday, horrendous journey as there was a points failure outside Milton Keynes, took him 8+ hours to get to us from Euston. My youngest drove up from Devon in his (my old) Alfa on Saturday as well, evening meal with the four of us. We set out at 10am Sunday morning, very easy drive up the M6, then off at the Kendal junction, threaded our way up to Windermere and then across to Ambleside, some traffic there due to a very unfortunately placed set of roadworks. The road from Ambleside to Little Langdale is a proper B road, threading between stone walls, ditches, cottages etc, lots of slow corners and passing points.
Parked up at the hotel,...

Specifically, an i7 xDrive60 M Sport, adorned with the Ultimate Pack (£30,000), total cost in the region of £170,000.

Since first sitting in one of these I've been keen to try one, they are quite comfortably the most impressive car on the market in terms of luxury and refinement - and priced as such! There have been some very strong lease deals, so that would make far more sense for anyone in the market for one, although the headline prices are at a quoted 6k miles a year, which is typically very low for this sort of car.

The refinement wasn't miles ahead of my current 740d, perhaps 10-15% better, but it's already very good. The car doesn't feel its size and these are LWB only now, so around 5.4m long (mine is about 5.1). They are huge and are pretty much too big for any normal car parking space.

No shortage of performance despite the near 3-tonne weight, thanks to the 544 bhp on offer. Realistic range was looking to be around 280-310 miles, against a quoted 381 mile maximum. So...