Dunno whether a trip with lots of car travel would be quite as pleasurable in the UK as in the US. Our English roads at least tend to be a bit twisty, crowded and not always in good condition, and our motorways are a bit of a nightmare. Towns and cities have layouts that never had cars in mind. On the other hand, we've travelled around Andalucía in southern Spain a lot with my sister. The roads are fairly straight and in very good condition and are nearly always quiet. They connect places with fantastic history and culture (think Granada, Córdoba and Seville, to name but a few) and there are hundreds of characterful little towns and villages, and there's some great high mountain scenery too in the Sierra Nevada and elsewhere. Oh, and the Costas...

I'm afraid my back doesn't travel well on long journeys any more, so I tend to regard driving as a means of getting somewhere as quickly as possible then dumping the wheels...