I never meant to become a road tripper. It just sort of happened, the way most British adventures do, by accident, mild confusion, and an optimistic belief that the sat‑nav probably knows what it’s doing.
A “perfect road trip” is one of those ideas that sounds wonderfully cinematic until you actually try to plan one. Americans talk about them as if they’re spiritual quests: Route 66, dusty diners, sunsets over the desert, a battered pickup truck, and some sort of emotional revelation involving a jukebox and a waitress named Jolene.
For the British, though, the whole thing feels faintly suspicious. We don’t really do transcendence on the open road. We do A303 tailbacks, tepid service‑station tea, and the creeping fear that we’ve left the immersion heater on. Even when we escape the island, we carry that negative energy with us like a national birthmark.
France, of course, is different. You set off expecting the usual British ordeal and instead find yourself gliding along endless tarmac that looks as if it was laid by angels with engineering degrees. The radio is terrible, but gloriously so, a man shouting about politics I don’t understand, a woman singing something that sounds like a Eurovision rehearsal, and the occasional burst of accordion that makes you wonder if you’ve slipped into a parody of continental life.
Then you stop at a service station and discover pastries so good they make you question every decision you’ve ever made about breakfast. People chat in the car park, half in English, half in French, everyone smiling politely because nobody really knows what anyone else is saying. It’s all very gentle, very human, and very unlike the American fantasy of roaring engines and existential freedom. It’s more… “I’m terribly sorry, but is this the right exit for Limoges?”
India, meanwhile, teaches you that the real “road trip” isn’t about the road at all. It’s the long train journeys, the strangers who become temporary companions, the food that may or may not agree with you, and the sense that the world is enormous and full of people who are kinder than you expect. It’s messy, unpredictable, and alive, the opposite of the curated American myth where the road is empty, the sky is huge, and the only other human is a hitchhiker who definitely has a backstory involving a broken dream.
So when someone asks, “How do you plan the perfect road trip?”, the honest British answer is probably, you don’t. You pack too much, forget something essential, apologise to strangers in two languages, and hope the car doesn’t make that noise again. You follow the road until it stops being stressful and starts being interesting. You accept that you’ll never be the sort of person who finds themselves in a desert diner having a life‑changing conversation with Jolene. You’ll be the person in a French car park discussing the weather with a man called Gérard while eating a pastry that is, frankly, better than most spiritual experiences.
The perfect road trip isn’t an American epic at all. It’s just movement, curiosity, and the quiet pleasure of being somewhere that isn’t home, with the comforting knowledge that, being British, you’ll still find something to apologise for along the way.
Further Reading
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