A vroom with a view: usher in the season by taking your motor for a spin along one of these (blooming) lovely stretches of highway.

In this age of long winters and blazing summers, spring seems an ever tinier sliver of time, which makes it all the more urgent that you escape while the buds are beginning to bloom. From behind the wheel of a car you’ll see the world washed clean by April showers, fresh-faced and ready for a new season of growth and, with winter past, you don’t have to worry about snow tyres or rust on your undercarriage. Even the daintiest Alfa and flightiest E-Type can be hauled out of storage and sparked back to life. So where to go? The following drives represent some of the best high-speed sightseeing experiences the world has to offer. Along some you can linger and breathe in the scents of fields of flowers and oceans liberated from sheets of ice; on others you can surge ahead at top speed like the sap shooting through a maple. Rest assured, there are plenty of Instagram-worthy pit stops.

This stretch cuts through the Highlands of Hollywood imagination, misty and haunting with endless shades of grey and green. Braveheart and Highlander were filmed amid these landscapes, which, perhaps unsurprisingly, look even more majestic without Mr Mel Gibson waving a sword around. Start your drive with a night in Glasgow, a cultural hub and industrial giant famed for its art, architecture and its production line of ferocious football managers. Stop by the Willow Tea Rooms for the best surviving example of the work of pioneering Arts and Crafts architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh. At Crabshakk on Argyle Street try seafood fished from the waters off the Western Isles. The next morning, rain or shine (most likely rain), head north on the A82. Loch Lomond stretches away mysteriously to your right. Mr Martin Wishart’s Michelin-starred restaurant at the Cameron House hotel may lure you off the road, but then it’s on up into the wild mountains that stretch up to Glen Coe, steeped in the blood of fighting clans.

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When you drive in Greece, you’ll often hear it said that the Greeks are the longest-lived people in Europe – until you add in car fatalities. Then they’re the shortest-lived. Rent a car in Athens and you’ll soon see why – but don’t let that discourage you from tackling the drive to this Unesco World Heritage site. The first couple of hours north from Athens aren’t much, but as you swing off the motorway and into the countryside towards Metéora, into the foothills of the Pindus Mountains, it feels as if you are going back centuries. Religious hermits first came to Metéora more than a thousand years ago, occupying caves high up in the rocks. There are now six working monasteries there, and the monks travel up by open-air cable cars. The roads are precipitous but the monasteries and the ouzeri that line the wooded roads in the valleys below make it more than worth the trip.

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It’s a short drive from Amsterdam to Haarlem, where the Flower Route begins and travels south just 25 miles to Leiden. But this is one of the most cultivated spots in the world, in every sense of the word. Haarlem has the small, ravishing Frans Hals Museum, and as you drive out you are immediately assaulted by geometric fields of colour, a painting by Mr Sol LeWitt come to life. In January the crocuses emerge, then come the daffodils, and by May tulips in every conceivable colour are in full bloom. Vendors line the roads eager to garland your car. The Keukenhof gardens in Lisse have more than 70 acres of tulip-filled parkland and display the astonishing wealth this flower brought to Holland. The college town of Leiden, with its churches, windmills, canals and scrums of bicycling students, is Amsterdam in miniature.

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Anyone whose idea of Japan is Tokyo will be astonished by Hokkaido. Its mountains look like the Alps, its farms like New England, its forests like Siberia, and its coastline like the Scottish Highlands. The Scenic Byway programme guides drivers along six routes across the island, from Sapporo, the island’s capital, to small towns such as Rausu on the Shiretoko peninsula – a place straight out of a novel by Mr Yukio Mishima. Fishermen dry their nets on the beach, while their catch is flown to the best restaurants in the country.

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It’s 25 miles from Ouray to Silverton, through the San Juan Mountains of southwestern Colorado, but if you’re the nervous type the Million Dollar Highway could feel like a thousand. The road climbs up to 11,000ft at Red Mountain Pass and plummets through hairpin turns without a guardrail to protect you from heart-stopping drops. The highway was designed in the 1880s as a toll road for wagons dragging ore through the mountains. It’s said to have earned its name from all the gold ore left in the dirt used to fill it. The reward for those with the stomach to drive it is an elk burger in one of Silverton’s saloons – the Miners Tavern if you’re hard enough and play a mean game of pool; Handlebars for the more refined.

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At 16,000 acres, South Mountain Park in Arizona is the largest municipal park in the US, ribboned with bike paths and hiking trails. Phoenix has sumptuous hotels, such as the Royal Palms, and great Mexican food at the Barrio Café. The drive up Summit Road to the highest peak of the park will leave you wondering at the sheer improbability of it all – a boom town plonked in the middle of the Sonoran Desert. If you crave something longer, head east on US Route 60 for Apache Junction, then out into the Lost Dutchman State Park through abandoned mining towns and the Superstition Mountains. A long stretch winds along dirt roads, taking you past agaves and cacti to the Theodore Roosevelt Dam. Rent a Jeep and give it a work-out.

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The Blue Ridge Mountains in North Carolina earned their name from the vibrant cobalt hue they take on when seen from a distance. Originally, it was organic compounds released by trees that caused this – now the coal-fired emissions of Appalachia’s industries contribute as well. But the views along the Blue Ridge Parkway – carved out by immigrant stonemasons from Italy and Spain during the Great Depression – remain spectacular. The Parkway actually starts in the rather uninspiring town of Rockfish Gap, but if you spend your first night in Charlottesville, the home of the University of Virginia, and drive fast enough in the morning, you can soon get to the good stuff. By late May, the mountain laurel is in bloom, while clouds of purple rhododendrons and pink azaleas, wild strawberries and witch hobble soon follow. The speed limit along the 469-mile route, which crosses 176 bridges and viaducts, never rises above 45mph, so a grand old dame of a convertible, a Cadillac Deville or Eldorado, should work fine.

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This is the road stick-shifts were made for. And Maseratis and Ferraris and Lancias, even the humblest Fiat. Snaking, crowded, falling down on one side to the Mediterranean, the route starts three hours south of Rome in the rollicking port of Salerno. Then you hit the SS163 in Vietri Sul Mare for Ravello. Vietri’s Sapore di Mare brings seafood straight from the sea to your plate. The towns cling to the hills between the sea below and forests sweeping up behind. Mr Gore Vidal, who held court for many years in Ravello, called the view from the Villa Cimbrone “the most beautiful in the world”. Swoop down to Praiano and Positano before ending in Sorrento with a large aperitivo at the Fauno Bar, weeks before the tourists come in throngs. Blast Pavarotti singing “Come Back to Sorrento”, and if you can’t be happy here, heaven help you.

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