Drives You Have Done

jk_gabba

gabba survivor
Ok, as a kinda partner thread to the Walks You Have Done one, and probably out of place in the Nature Section..

I'm a relatively new driver, about 5 months so far, and I've only really done lots of local and motorway trips. But now the suns out in the UK and my car stereos working properly I'm planning on spending the next few weekends driving round the UK in preparation for an American road trip starting in LA in the summer. So can anyone share any good trips in the southern UK or America, or worldwide?
 

carlos

manos de piedra
i love the desert- did some good drives around tucson, arizona. tons of cactus, windy hilly roads- very nice. i was there in late september though. the heat in the summer can be lethal.

i've driven around texas quite a bit- from houston to dallas/austin/san antonio. mostly flat and swampy around here. these are all about 3 hour trips (each way) - with long stretches of nothing but low prairie grass and cattle...
 

nomos

Administrator
When I was 19 I went on a road trip with three friends to the west coast. On the first leg of the trip we drove non-stop (save for one meal, toilets and gas) from Thunder Bay (on the border of Ontario and Minnesota) to Spokane, Washington. That was a bit heavy. I can't really sleep in cars and I ended up driving the third shift (180 km/hr across North Dakota in the middle of the night) and the last one without having slept for a couple of days. Three things stood out on that part of the trip: restaurants where every dish, even salads, contained large helpings of meat and where vinegar for chips had to be fetched from the cleaning supplies closet; interstate highways on the sides of mountains where the minimum speed limit was 70 mph; and a little town in Idaho that was between two mountains and fully underneath the highway, thus causing the sun to disappear by 2 PM. A friend got out to use the phone and the rest of us were followed by a gaggle of hollow-eyed children. Oh and the gas station in Montana that carried horse saddles and shotguns interesting.

On the way back we drove through Canada and, again, I had a late-night shift near the beginning. This time I was driving through the Rockies in an enormous thunderstorm with heavy fog. The roads were winding. The car was hydro-planing and we couldn't stop because we were in the middle of the mountains with 18-wheel logging trucks whizzing about despite the 0-visibility. Everyone else in the car fell asleep early on and no one could understand why I was so shaken afterwards. I thank Orbital for keeping my nerves calm until we made it through to Banff and the edge of the prairies. That was another non-stop trip. 30 hours - most of it spent staying 15 minutes ahead of that same storm system as it moved to the East.

Apart from all of that, it was a great trip, though I didn't really speak to my companions for several years afterwards.
 
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