I've been on a road trip kick lately, and every time I think I'm out of routes to get excited about, somebody drops a list that makes me want to gas up and go. SheerLuxe just put together three picks spanning the UK, Europe, and the USA, and two of them are routes I've driven pieces of myself.

The USA one involves national parks, which, nobody is shocked. I won't spoil the exact route because their writeup is worth reading for the specifics, but I'll say this: any road trip built around American national parks is going to be the kind of trip where you look back at your photos later and none of them do it justice. I've hiked and driven through enough of the park system to know the scale of these places doesn't translate to a phone screen. You have to be there, standing at a viewpoint in the kind of wind that messes up your hair for the next three hours, to get it.

The European pick is where things get interesting. The source mentions luxury tours of dramatic fjords, and I won't name a specific country since the article summary doesn't, but fjords are fjords. I've driven mountain roads in the Austrian Alps and I've spent time in Iceland, but fjord country is a different animal. The landscape doesn't gradually build to something beautiful. You come around a blind curve and the whole world just opens up into water and stone and green that goes straight up. It's the kind of driving where you have to remind yourself to watch the road because everything in your peripheral vision is trying to pull your eyes off it.

The UK route is the one I haven't done yet, and it bugs me. The UK has some of the best driving roads I've been on, narrow and winding through landscapes that look like they were designed by somebody who really wanted you to slow down. Any route through the British countryside is going to reward you for taking the slow way.

What I like about lists like this is the reminder that road trips don't have to be a massive production. You don't need a built-out overland rig or three weeks of vacation time. Pick one stretch of one of these routes, drive it in a long weekend, see what happens. The outdoors belong to everybody. That includes the roads that get you there.

When's the last time you drove somewhere with no real plan beyond seeing what was around the next bend? That's the version of travel I keep coming back to, and these three routes are a solid place to start.