Highway to Heaven

I’m not big into road trips, and I do little planning. I’ve only driven in Ireland and in the UK. In Ireland, I can think of four road trips that I’ve done repeatedly. I’m not sure if I’d use the word “perfect” though. You often need to drive through dull areas to reach the nice places. You might get alternative scenic routes, but I’m a little scared of very narrow roads where I might need to reverse until I find a place to pull into to avoid an oncoming car. Sometimes, the oncoming car kindly reverses instead 😀.

Anyway, here are the Irish trips:

• Ring of Kerry – Starting and ending at Killarney and maybe taking a little detour to Glengarriff and the Garnish Island
• Dingle Peninsula – I sometimes take the quick boring road from Dingle to the coast to avoid the scary scenic drive along the Southern coast, but I have done the full coastal drive a few times.
• Wild Atlantic Way near Clare – That’s pretty close to my home. I often stop at Ailwee Cave, Doolin, Lahinch and Kilkee. I think the Cliffs of Moher are a little overrated, but their worth seeing a few times. However, I often skip them. I’ve also gone to to Galway and Connemara on several occasions.
• Antrim Coast – This includes the Giant’s Causeway. It’s a while since I’ve been up North, but it’s a delightful drive. The last time that I did it, I had a scary squeaky wheel. I was afraid that it would fall off 😀, but it was nothing really. Someone told me that it was related to the hot summer. You can go along part of the coast by rail too.

And here are the UK trips

• North Wales – On several occasions, I took the ferry from Dublin to Holyhead and along the North Wales coast. That’s a wonderful area. I sometimes took a slight detour to visit Betws-y-Coed and even went as far as Llangollen and Llanberis near Mount Snowdon.
• Lakes District and Yorkshire Dales – While staying at Southport, we went up to the Lake District and back down through the Yorkshire Dales. Another trip from Southport was over to Hebden Bridge and Haworth and across tp Skipton and Bolton Abbey.
• North Somerset – While staying near Weston Super-Mare, we went across to Cheddar Gorge and Wells and also visited Lacock and Castlecombe in nearby Wiltshire.
• North Devon – A final trip worth mentioning is one we took a few times in North Devon – visiting Wachet, Dunster, Minehead, up the scary Porlock Hill and down to Lynmouth. That trip was great – apart from being behind a coach that got stuck on Porlock Hill and having to reverse down the hill to give it space to maneuver.

Nowadays, I often revisit all these places using GoogleEarth-type apps on my Meta Oculus virtual reality (VR) headset. And there’s so many places in the UK that I haven’t visited by road, but I prefer the train in any case. I do drive a truck around Europe in Eurotruck Simulator 2. It’s good fun because you can listen to radio stations from each country. It’s all mock, which is just as well because I frequently crash into other vehicles 😀. I do that too in Wreckfest – great fun.

Anyway, I like to include songs and some spiritual content in my posts, so here goes – a few secular songs about cars or roads and a Scripture verse and songs that use roads as metaphors.

^{Matthew 7:13 -14} 
“Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. ¹⁴ But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.”