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@NurseHolliday
This weekend I drove to Luxembourg to stay with an old uni friend and go snowboarding.
I read this article on Speedhunters and decided I needed to spend some time driving around on Luxembourg's back roads.
http://www.speedhunters.com/2014/01/little-caterham-little-switzerland/
Oh. My. God.
Luxembourg has been hovering around on my radar for some years, my dad used to live and work out there, and I had a very minor taste of the roads there a few years ago. I didn't manage to do the full route that's shown in the article, but followed the advice to just pick a road between two towns. The roads have perfect tarmac, they have good scenery, they are undulating, flowing, a beautiful mix of high speed corners and tight twisties. The roads are also empty, especially at midday on a Tuesday during a working week, there's stone walls, and rock formations for exhaust noise to bounce off, there's lone locals walking through quiet villages who wave as you roll through in 2nd, making the loudest noise they've heard since their alarm went off that morning. It's just a brilliant place to drive around.
Tor's Pass in Northern Ireland was more technical, more challenging, and physically draining, but then it is a tarmac stage of the Ulster Rally, it also has a poor road surface, there's random bits of mud and gravel strewn across the road causing you to grab armfuls of oppo when you least expect or desire it. It's also mostly single lane, so when you're really laying down the hammer, you have to fucking pray there's nothing coming the other way. It's also in fucking Northern Ireland, which requires an expensive and ridiculously long ferry crossing.
North Wales was easier to get to but it's always raining, there's traffic, every chump in a RenaultSport hatch who reads Evo is out there on a weekend dicing with locals just trying to get from home to the shops, and the food is shit.