Thank you to Charles for his ID on the Bristol 400 – I was rather hoping he’d pick up on it
Beaune is a walled city surrounded by some of the world's most famous wine villages and is considered the “Capital of Burgundy wines”. The central old town is largely surrounded by surviving battlements, ramparts, and a moat from centuries past and although tourism is secondary to the town’s primary purpose – the wine industry – it attracts considerable tourist trade. There are lots of bars and restaurants, fashion and wine shops that, unusually for a French town of this size that isn’t just a tourist spot, remain open at lunchtime!
As we continued to walk around Beaune I caught another glimpse of the Bristol 400 from my previous post:
It was clear that the driver was looking for something, but what? Then as we walked a little further, another Bristol was parked outside one of the old-town hotels:
There was definitely something going on “Bristol-wise”! After a bit more meandering through narrow streets and alleyways we found ourselves at the rear of the hotel above and I spotted the same car being driven into the hotel carpark:
Wandering in I saw around a dozen Bristol cars of various vintages parked up in the hotel carpark. Here are a couple more:
It turned out that this was the start point for a UK Bristol Owners’ Club event heading to Provence. I hope they had as good a time as we did
One of the key landmarks of the town is the 15th-century Hôtel-Dieu, also known as The Hospices de Beaune:
Founded in August 1443 by Nicolas Rolin, the then Duke of Burgundy’s Chancellor, and his wife Guigone de Salins, the building was a hospital and refuge for the poor, of which there were many. At the time the majority of the population of Beaune were destitute as a result of the pillaging and destruction wrought by marauding bands of mercenaries or écorcheurs (literally “flayers”). These vicious careerist soldiers for hire had become unemployed since the 1435 Treaty of Arras that had formally ended disputes between the Armagnacs and Burgundians and formed themselves into autonomous groups of Routiers who terrorised the French countryside and lived off the spoils of their pillaging and collecting ransoms. To cap it all, the area had recently suffered an outbreak of plague just to add to the misery. As well as the hospice itself, Rolin established the “Les sœurs hospitalières de Beaune” religious order, with the sisters living and providing care for the sick and poor at the Hôtel-Dieu. Fascinatingly, the building remained a functioning hospital caring for the elderly, disabled and sick people, orphans, women about to give birth and the destitute from the date it received its first patient on 1st January 1452 right up until the late 1970’s.
For €7.50 each we spent a couple of fascinating hours taking an audio-guided tour of the place. Here’s the famous Courtyard with the polychrome roofs:
This is the Room of the Poor, the main “ward”. Measuring 50 x 14 x 16 metres, the central area would have been set up with benches and tables for meals, with the patients, up to two to a bed, in the curtained rows of beds down each side:
As you would expect, religious iconography features strongly:
But the beams of the exposed painted frame of the roof are decorated with amusing sculpted animals and caricatures of important inhabitants of Beaune, and each cross-beam bursts from the mouth of a mythical creature:
The large polyptych Beaune Altarpiece by the Flemish artist Rogier van der Weyden, which dates from the middle of the 15th-Century, is on display in a separate environmentally controlled room with very low light levels. It’s quite stunning:
And I have no idea who this dandy thinks he is
From Beaune we headed north to Arras for our last night, returning to the UK by Eurotunnel on Saturday morning. No matter how many times I do trips to continental Europe it still comes as a shock how appalling our road surfaces are in the UK when I return. After almost two weeks travelling on super-smooth, well-maintained, French roads even major motorways such as the M20 come as an unpleasant shock. We (as a country) really do need to invest properly in our road transport infrastructure before it all degenerates to the point where it’s irrecoverable
I said in an earlier post that we’d found the R171 SLK350 made a very competent “mini Grand Tourer” and having driven the SLK55 for just under 2,500 miles in two weeks I can say that the R172 is better in pretty much every respect. It’s more refined, more comfortable, road noise is more subdued making it less tiring on a long high-speed drive, the ride’s better, and the cabin is a nicer place to be. It achieved a very creditable 27.2mpg over the trip (real brim-to-brim measure) and was thoroughly good fun. The only aspect of the R171 that I can honestly say has the R172 beaten is that even with the very expensive optional AIRGUIDE wind deflector, there is much more wind buffeting than in the R171 when fitted with the genuine Perspex wind deflector. In the R171 you could travel comfortably at motorway speeds with the top down while sitting in still air, whereas in the R172 there’s always a degree of wind buffeting at higher speeds regardless of how the AIRGUIDE wind deflector is set. Not a problem for a baldy like me, but Angie ended up fighting hair in her face which was a bit of a disappointment
Previously in this thread I discussed aspects of the car’s performance, but one thing I didn’t mention was the gearbox. My facelift E63 has the AMG Speedshift MCT 7-speed ’box which, with the latest software, is very good. It’s still not quite as fast responding as a DCT ’box, but it’s not far behind with very little lag between flicking a paddle in manual mode and a crisp change up or down. By comparison the AMG Speedshift Plus 7G-Tronic ’box in the SLK55 is lethargic and dull-witted and somewhat spoils the driving experience in manual mode. There’s a l-o-n-g delay between flicking a shift paddle and the ’box responding which means you have to recalibrate your brain to anticipate the moment in the immediate future when you want another gear selected, and send a postcard request for action to the gearbox which will eventually react. I’ll be asking at the dealer’s if there’s a software update available to improve this and will report back.
So, gearbox and wind deflector notwithstanding, the R172 SLK55 is a great car that acquitted itself very well on its first roadtrip with us. I think it’s a keeper
Hopefully you’ve enjoyed our French Odyssey and perhaps it’s encouraged some of you to take a continental road trip of your own? I do hope so.
and an uncharacteristically light breakfast, we set off for our next stop: La Ciotat. In the rain. Again.
You get sonorous blips on downshifts and a great guttural roar when you boot it out of a corner. The only downside to all this is that it encourages you to travel at naughty speeds just so you can listen to the thing! And in a tunnel, well… 
