Soft green rolling hills, beautiful baby blue skies with wispy clouds dotted here and there. Air so clear you can see right to the edge of the world! Water so pure you drink it straight out of the stream and it tastes wonderful. Yes I am in Scotland.
Apart from the above it is also lovely to drive here. No major traffic jams or gridlock. Yesterday I drove straight through the biggest city, Glasgow, with no stops for lights or tailbacks. Unlike Bahrain there is enough roads and enough room for the number of cars.
Today I will embark on one of the world’s great journeys. I am going to drive up the West Coast of Scotland, through Glencoe to Fort William and then on up towards Cape Wrath by way of Poolewe, Aultbae and Ullapool. What makes this drive so great is the dramatic hills and glens, the free flowing burns and streams, the serene sea lochs and the narrow single track winding roads that you drive along at a speed slow enough to be able to take in all around you, and wonder.
Then there is the wildlife, the golden eagle soaring above you, the mighty red stag standing on the ridge keeping a watchful eye on his harem, the blubbery seals lying about on the rocks trying to get some heat, and the rabbits and pheasants that are constantly playing chicken in the road. Sounds idyllic and it is until the tractor comes around the corner. It is harvest season and tractors are out in force and they are massive. Now you have to reverse half a kilometre back along the windy road to a passing place and that’s not easy for someone who has only reversed into parking spaces for the last 20 years. Still it’s all part of the fun.
The fun stops in a couple of days when I head back to England, not that I don’t like England and not that it does not have its own wonderful scenery, it does, but because of the aforementioned traffic. The fun stops as soon as you hit the M6. Hundreds of trucks going about their business thousands of cars all trying to get to the same place at the same time. Slower and slower is your progress the further south you go until you come to a complete stop on the car park that is the M25.
The London orbital road was created in the in the 60s and 70s but only completed in 1986. It is 188km long and was meant to enable the free flow of traffic around London. The problem with the M25 is that it is not just a ring road it is also a hub. If I want to get from Corydon to Uxbridge, then it is the perfect solution but if I want to go from Oxford to Dover, why do I need to go around the M25? I do because they made all the other motorways converge with it. There is no point now in trying to fix it. They would probably make it worse and anyway the self driving car is on its way and that will massively reduce the number of cars on the road. Might even be a help for Bahrain as well.