I’m sure most of us have had an absolute white-knuckled drive through a terrifying road - whether it’s a terrifying mountain switchback or just a poorly designed miserable highway. Go nuts!
The road to Hana on Maui, in the dark, in the rain, with the wipers not working that great. Every hundred feet is a hairpin turn or a one-way bridge. The locals drive it at like 80 mph. Definitely an adventure.
Definitely road to Hana. Especially doing the complete loop that has you end upcountry. Those cliff-side sections where the guardrails are rusted and busted are intense in the best conditions.
well… it made the news: https://www.northantstelegraph.co.uk/news/people/is-this-britains-worst-road-kettering-parents-furious-at-school-access-1327488
Quite tame for most other places, but unusually standard for the UK.
Road I live on a manhole cover is literally half exposed out the road. not the rover to it, the actual frame the cover goes into. council doesn’t care. But they just repaved a road which had only been done 5 years before, and definitely didn’t need re-doing.
Got lost on a mountain road with my partner in scorching heat in Apple Valley, CA with no cell phone reception. Picture a one lane road not much wider than our car with an almost sheer cliff on one side. It lead to a point with a super steep rocky climb that my little coupe would have no chance of getting over. The only option was to backtrack. There was no way I was going to drive in reverse the whole way down, so I got out and tried to gauge how much room there was to turn around. I look over the edge and see an old rusted pickup truck belly up at the bottom of the gorge. I calmly get back in the car and ask my partner to make hand signals when I get close to the edge and started doing a 137+point turn inch by inch to get the car turned around. Eventually we got out of there and had a fun rest of our trip, but feel like we could easily have met the same fate as that upended truck. I later told my partner about that truck, and they said they saw it but kept calm and didn’t tell me so I wouldn’t freak out either.
Corsica. The Calanques de Piana. The road is barely one coach wide, and it’s got a sheer drop on one side and goes straight up on the other. Everybody parks on the passing places so if you meet someone you’re screwed. I met a coach. Luckily I was driving a Twingo. I managed to get past it with one side of the car about 5 cm from the drop, with the coach driver helping me out. The coach badly scratched one of the cars parked on the passing place. Karma for the dumb tourist.
Most of the roads in Ireland, at least for my 'Murrican sensibilities. My wife and I took our honeymoon in Ireland and rented a car to get around. Aside from driving on the opposite side of the road, we were unprepared for how narrow all but the main highways were. The typical road there is comparable to a small country road here, is often lined with hedges right up to the edges, and often lacks a center line. The sheer terror of going past a large truck going the opposite way on one of those for the first time was very, very memorable. We eventually got used to it, but that first day or two of driving was definitely white-knuckled.
It’s the same in the UK and I’d expect most of Europe too.
Cornwall though is in a whole different category of narrow roads - https://youtu.be/T5dBPhZivto from ~4 min 30
Highway 63, before it was twinned as much as it is. During the oil boom fucking sports cars would appear out of nowhere and try a suicide pass of 8 vehicles coming right at you going the opposite way. Terrifying. A truck tried to pass another way back in 2012 and ended up killing 7 people including an 11 year old girl which sparked the need to twin the highway.
North Texas has some really bad roads that I’ve seen, especially if you go through a country road
I just drove to Alaska and back by way of the Alaska highway through Canada in a Ford van. The road is pretty destroyed for about 300 miles around the border of Alaska and Canada. Huge potholes, massive hills, sections of road that have collapsed, wildlife, dirt and gravel sections, massive cliffs, and twisty roads all while traffic is moving at 55-70ish mph.
In iraq, the insurgets blew up the left abd right sides of the road. you litterally can only drive in the middle of the road, some roads where blown up all together so we just had to follow the guy in front of us and hope to not get blown up :P
We were driving from Puerto Viejo de Talamanca on the east coast of Costa Rica to San Jose to catch our late flight home. We had decided to go to the Jaguar Rescue Center in the morning, thinking we had lots of time for the drive. That turned out to be a bad call because there had been torrential rain in Braulio Carrillo National Park, our planned route on highway 32 was closed due to landslides, and alternate routes doubled our trip time. We’d budgeted lots of time to get to San Jose before our flight so that part wasn’t a problem, but it meant we’d be driving through the mountains after dark.
Holy shit let me tell you, when tourist guides to Costa Rica tell you not to drive in the mountains after dark, it is for a good fucking reason. Picture a steep, winding mountain road. Now imagine gutters on either side of the road that are V-shaped, four feet deep with 45 degree sloping sides. Now blanket the whole scene in the thickest pea soup fog you can imagine. That’s mountain driving after dark in Costa Rica.
This was done in a shitty little rental hatchback with no fog lights, because of course we weren’t planning to do any mountain driving after dark but fuck if it didn’t happen anyway! It was a solid hour of the most intense pucker-factor driving I’ve ever had to do. The only reason I’m not a corpse on the side of a Costa Rican mountain is because some local with fog lights passed me on one of those roads, and by god I got onto that guys tail lights like fucking tick and drafted him all the way down the mountain. Shout out to the Costa Rican in that beat-up red pickup, I’m only alive today because of him.
Haha. I knew I was gonna find our roads here.
And yeah you drove by the Cerro de la Muerte (Death Mountain) at night. That’s a big no-no!
That road is always almost coveted with fog (even during the day).I would say this road is second most dangerous after Route 32. And yeah, Route 32 is the worst offender here. It cuts through one of our biggest national parks. It has no business there, and mother nature is always trying to reclaim that lost strip.
Always avoid doing long trips during the night in Costa Rica, especially if you’re not a local. We have very narrow and poorly maintained roads.
And yeah you drove by the Cerro de la Muerte (Death Mountain) at night. That’s a big no-no! That road is always almost coveted with fog (even during the day).
Wait, so the actual proper name of the mountain I crossed, at night, under heavy fog, translates as Death Mountain?? Actually yeah, that seems pretty sensible based on what I saw. Clearly I was lucky to make it through without suffering a disaster of some kind. On the one hand I fully acknowledge that I was an idiot to put myself in that situation… but on the other hand it sounds really badass, so this detail is definitely getting added to the story whenever I tell it in future.
