"Is this a road?" My wife asked?
"I'm not sure," I replied. "The GPS says it is so I'm going with it."
In the back of my mind I thought this was some kind of joke and that this "road" was leading us to somewhere that would certainly lead to our death. I've seen these roads before. They are usually named after the one legged hillbilly with the moonshine still and the collection of shotguns that lives at the end of it. Only this time we were in rural Cornwall in Southwest England.
The roads in England had been tight up to that point; mainly wide enough for two cars to slowly pass each other, but this road wasn't even wide enough for our ONE car. The thicket of shrubbery was scratching at the side our vehicle and with every passing mile I could only think that I should have purchased insurance on our rental car. I had been on some harrowing roads in Italy and France, but these were unlike anything that I have ever seen.
“Be careful going around that corner,” my wife warned.
“Which one?” I wondered. “The whole road is one big corner.”
Not having seen a car in what seemed like an hour, I really began to wonder where the hell we were going and why nobody else was following us. Looking at the map, you could see that there was a town somewhere ahead and the Celtic Sea was no more than a stones throw from our car window. The only problem though was that we couldn’t see it.
When we are in a new place, we are not ones to take the highway. We didn’t travel to Cornwall to see a road like we could at home. The idea is to explore; to see the sights that you would never get to see otherwise. Here were were on a road that seemed like it would do just that, but the road was so small and the shrubs were so high that our lasting memory was of the road ahead of us and the bushes above us swallowing our little vehicle.
We didn’t regret taking the road to nowhere because in the end every road leads to somewhere. Sometimes in order to see things that you wouldn’t normally see, you have to go places that people don’t normally go. In our case, the payoff was huge.
Not every road is going to lead you some place amazing, so you might as well make the ride there as comfortable as possible. The Kia Sportage is the type of vehicle that is small enough to fit on the tiniest of roads, but also large enough to make the ride to your destination one that you will enjoy. Wherever the road leads you, ride there in style.
I was fortunate to ride around Washington DC in a Kia during the Dad 2.0 Summit. I love what they are doing to celebrate dads as everyday heroes.
