Canyons; The Road Less Traveled; Village Byways; Urban Excursions; Driving Through History; and Gourmet Road Trips.

If I had a quibble with any of the choices, it was the absence of two from the Driving Through History chapter: touring the D-Day beaches in Normandy and taking the Road to Liberty from Utah Beach to Bastogne--literally driving in the tank tracks of Patton's Third Army.

Among the other roads from Drives of a Lifetime that I've driven is the drive on CA 190 from Olancha to Death Valley Junction (Page 152). Every summer, I work out my inner spy by shooting future prototypes.

Other drives include Germany's Baltic Coast (Page 97), where I visited the museum dedicated to Germany's World War Two rocket innovations, and the Stelvio Pass (Page 30) just this past Fall.

Few things in life are better than a responsive car on a mountain road replete with challenging switchbacks. Drives of a Lifetime has given me a blueprint for at least three drives I hope to take: the Julian Alps in Slovenia (Page 268), Germany's Romantic Road from Würzburg to Füssen on the Austrian border (Page 273), and the drive from Toyota to Kyoto (Page 131).

The question for the last trip is: Which car? I can think of one... a vintage Toyota 2000GT.

Other future drives will surely include Norway's Coastal Route, a challenge shown on Page 98. And what could be finer than the Mississippi Blues Highway, U.S. 61 and U.S. 49, with B.B. King and Howlin' Wolf playing through the speaker of a 1959 Caddy convertible? It's described on Page 114.

Like Classic Motorsports Routes, National Geographic's Drives of a Lifetime belongs on the bookshelf of every avid road tripper. It is sure to inspire automotive travelers of every sort to find their own roads less traveled.

We wish to thank the Book Division of the National Geographic Society *for providing the photographs used in this gallery.