I've had my 7.5 pp gti since 1st March and all this time I have been pining for a drive to enjoy its performance. Driving around the Cheltenham, Gloucester, Evesham area does not seem to cut it.
However at the weekend on my drive to a rendez-vous near Merthyr Tydfil I was confronted by the closure of the Heads of the Valley Road, the A465, just west of Abergavenny. The Road Gods had, in their omnipotence, simply closed this major arterial road. A diversion was not obvious and I kept switching between the built-in nav and Google Maps which quickly became unusable when the mobile signal was lost. And I was going to be late.
Now it is a lesson for life that you must quieten the negative emotions within in order to enjoy the here and now. I'm not sure I really managed to achieve this, and looking at the map now the obvious diversion should have been along the A40, but the route I ended up taking was a mountainous pass, probably the A4246.
At last, the pulling power from low revs, the no-understeer of the limit-slip front diff and the huge power margin of the free revving engine came to elevate me emotionally and physically. It was a brief but wonderful experience of what my Golf is really for.
I shall now put up with the somewhat harsh ride over the appalling road surfaces of Gloucestershire, the worry of leaving a trophy car in a Gloucester public car park and the jibes of friends who tell me that I am too old to have a mid-life crisis, and hope that one day soon I will find myself again on a deserted twisty mountain pass where the car will come into its own.
Do we have, on this forum, a list of nice roads well suited to this sort of thing?