The Road I Never Found Again

There’s a road I drove once, just once and I’ve never been able to find it again. I’m not even convinced it was a real road. It might’ve been fire access. It might’ve been someone’s private drive. But that night, it was open, inviting, and impossible to ignore.

I was in a Triumph TR6, top down, engine singing that loud, unapologetic straight-six note that makes you forget the car is basically held together by optimism and British spite. It was one of those drives where you’re not in a rush, but you don’t want to go home yet either. The kind of night where you follow your curiosity instead of your map.

I took a turn I don’t remember choosing, and suddenly I was on this freshly paved strip of pavement that didn’t match anything around it. No road signs. No lighting. No center line. Just a ribbon of twisty, narrow asphalt carved into the dark.

The TR6 felt almost too big for it and that car isn’t exactly known for its generous proportions. Every bend came quicker than the last, the lane tightening, the trees leaning in like they were trying to watch me thread the needle. The headlights caught glimpses of guardrails, then none at all. Sharp climbs, blind crests, fast drops like a tamed-down mountain pass someone forgot to tell the county about.

And the engine… God, the engine. Wide open, echoing off trees, bouncing off rock, howling into the night like it had been waiting for this exact stretch its whole life.

It was an eternity of pure joy. Pure focus. Pure freedom.

And then the road spat me out onto a familiar route as if nothing had happened. No sign. No marker. No clue how I got there.

I’ve tried to find it since a few times, actually. Checked maps. Drove the same area. Looked for any hint of that turn. Nothing. It’s like the road folded back into the world the second I left it.

But I think that’s the point.

Some roads aren’t meant to be mapped. They’re meant to be moments the kind you get once, the kind you can’t force, the kind that remind you why driving ever felt like freedom in the first place.

And every now and then, when I’m on some boring straightaway, I still wonder where that road went… or if it was ever really there at all.