Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder. It's Wednesday the 18th of October and I've spent the day at Highways UK.

This is the show at the NEC in Birmingham, which has the slogan, Roads for a Connected Future.

I've been finding out all sorts of things

with all kinds of interesting people

from the Cat's Eyes,

which now have their own little solar panel built in,

so they stay alight the whole time, at night at least,

through to the archaeology work

that's done by national highways.

And I thought it would be a good opportunity to tell you about my favourite A roads in each of the

four UK nations. Let's start, I think, with England. And it's actually a road which goes very, very close to Scotland.

The A69, this is the one that goes from east to west, or west to east, depends where you want to go across the Pennines from Newcastle through to Carlisle.

Both of them, great cities.

Both of them, of course course really we're paralleling the

Hadrian's war and it's a great opportunity it's only roughly 55 miles long or so

but it goes through superb scenery it's a relatively fast road so definitely much better done driving than, for example,

as I've done bits of cycling. And it takes you, well, coast to coast from the North Sea to the

Irish Sea and you can do it, yeah, I suppose if you were lucky with the cities at each end,

you could almost kind of paddle in the North Sea and then be over in the Solway, Firth,

barely an hour later.

So it's a lovely road to start us off.

I'm more infused, it must be said, by the other three nations. nations in Wales I'm going to go for the

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