Norway is a treasure. Some of the finest roads in Europe are here, clinging to the black-green water of fjords, scrambling over mountains too young to be gentle, all hidden behind a wall of expense and vicious weather. One week a summer, the sun shines relentlessly over the whole of it, lighting a playground so beautiful, it hurts to recall. What do you do on a day with 19 hours of sun? You get in a Miata, and you drive.

We aim to tackle two of the Northern Hemisphere's legendary routes—Trollstigen and the Atlantic Ocean Road—before charging for the Arctic Circle. The Internet is plastered with images of the gnarled mountain path and the graceful arching bridges that span from one spit of land to the next. In photos, the roads are abandoned. Empty and waiting for you or me to come tearing through in a perfect convertible.

Max Prince is along for the ride. The bosses want him here as insurance against me driving until my eyes melt. He's a young guy with an affinity for caffeine and nicotine, graced with the kind of admirable disregard for his own well-being I appreciate in a co-pilot. I like the guy. We pick up our Miata, a no-frills model with 12 miles on the odometer, at the Port of Oslo. The top goes down in the width of a thought. For the next two days, the canvas won't go back up under any circumstance. Rain. Snow. Hellish sun. We're committed.

We leave town by early afternoon, but I've made up my mind before we hit the highway: This is the best convertible on sale right now. Light and taut, with a bright 2.0-liter engine that howls to redline like an enlightened incarnation of the breathy 1600-cc job in the first car. It gets its tongue in your ear, coaxing you sideways through city-center roundabouts and begging, please oh please, for just a little more throttle. The MX-5 grabs eyes from the sidewalks by the armful. Awkward and disjointed in photos, the rounded lines work in the flesh. They need motion and light the way a trout does. I'm in love before the first mile's up, and not just with the concept of The New Miata. With this Miata. An irrational bond to disposable Japanese metal. Mazda's good at that.

Tom Salt

There's water everywhere. Still lakes shine through the trees, reflecting sky and cloud and bird and mountain with just enough imperfection to be real.

We flick our way through villages and dense conifer forests, pop along numerical highways as they march through places with shotgun blasts of consonants and vowels for names. Skimtelflaten. Skrukkelia. Østrønningen. Always toward Lillehammer. There's water everywhere. Still lakes shine through the trees, reflecting sky and cloud and bird and mountain with just enough imperfection to be real.

There's an architectural cohesion here, too. Stout little houses built to shoulder arctic snows sit like white and red flowers in the rare and ceaseless sun. They look as if they were hewed by the same hand, but the consistency isn't oppressive. Just comfortable. The roads are smooth. There's no trash in the ditches or gaudy billboards on the shoulder. Sheep with brass bells around their necks sleep in bright patches on the tarmac, the deep-earth smell of their wool floating in through the Miata's open top.

Tom Salt

It's 10:30 when we finally find our hotel, part of a family theme park outside Lillehammer. The fair-haired girls behind the counter wear traditional Norwegian garb and hand over tickets to a roller coaster with our room keys. We should turn in, but we're wired from the drive, so we sit on the deck instead, drinking and poring over tomorrow's maps until tomorrow becomes today.

The morning air is sharp and cool after a quick sleep, and when I rummage a breath from deep in my chest, I watch it leave my lungs in wisps. It's the last remnants of winter, a quiet reminder that deep snow and long nights are never far away. The seasons are a give-and-take here, maybe more so than anywhere else in the world. For every extended summer day, there's a similarly cruel and interminable winter night. I try not to think about it. We get in the Miata, crank the heater as high as it'll go, and point ourselves north.

This car is the great communicator, abandoning stiff springs and absurd damper rates for just the right amount of compliance and movement. There's a little sidewall flex and a taste of body roll. It's exciting, and those skinny tires tell you exactly what's going to happen before the show gets out of hand. It makes for easy, controllable slides that help you look the hero. But there's grip, too. Keep pushing and the Miata will back your play, soaking up a thrashing with neither complaint nor drama.

Miata Norway Tom Salt

It's almost noon by the time we make our way to the base of Trollstigen. The road opened in 1936 after eight years of construction, replacing a crooked footpath across the mountains with slightly less crooked pavement. The asphalt scratches its way up a nine percent grade with 11 switchbacks from valley to pass, ascending some 2000 feet in the process. Engineering by Escher.

We've made a terrible mistake. The road hasn't started climbing before traffic backs up. Big touring bikes laden with luggage squeeze along behind wide Harleys, massive tour buses waddle their way ever upward, and a fleet of camper vans trundles along behind. This is not driving nirvana. It's a new flavor of hell. If we're doing 15 mph, I'd be surprised.

At least it's beautiful. Waterfalls pour from above, the sun lighting their mists iridescent and billowing. The sky is winter blue with just a few white clouds daring the mountains to reach a little higher. From our vantage point in the valley, we can barely make out a set of footprints in the snow at the summit. And there, three tiny humans looking down on us fools waiting in line for the chance to say we drove Norway's most famous road.

We take advantage of a pull-off to park and let traffic roll by. Before I can blink, a bus full of cruise-ship parolees pulls up and unloads. We're surrounded by tourists holding iPads and smartphones at arm's length like offerings to some unseen and demanding god. They're everywhere, and then they're not, gone as quickly as they came. And so are we. We tear out of that valley and make a hard press for the sea.

I want the Atlantic Ocean Road to be better, but when we arrive, there's only more traffic, more tour buses, and a gift shop. In the winter, crashing waves will paint these ink-spot spits of land with ice, but today, the sky is clear and the sea is calm. It's underwhelming, and after spending the better part of 12 hours darting up the arthritic asphalt of the country's interior with the promise of internationally renowned driving, it's a letdown. I toss Prince the key and point him toward Trondheim.

The city's been perched on the rough southern lip of a wide fjord since before our years had four digits, sitting on the same frozen latitude as the less hospitable portions of Canada and Russia. The solstice is a big deal here. It's 1:30 a.m., but the streets are still packed with people in sunglasses and daringly short club wear. We pick a bar with tinted windows and walk into a space adorned with gold AK-47 lamps and the sound of Kanye abusing Daft Punk pounding through the stereo. We've found our people.

Tom Salt

Prince fetches a pair of pints and listens patiently as I rant against the absurdity of plodding from one tourist pit to the next. We'd planned to gun for the Arctic Circle tomorrow, but if I see one more gift shop or tour bus, I'll wind up getting a look at Norway's famously excellent prison system. I make a decision. We're done chasing points on the map. Starting tomorrow, we pick the most twisty lines and go where they take us.

Norway is one of those glorious countries whose roads have no interest in the direct route. The old paths course over and around the landscape, as natural and flowing as any stream. The morning leads us south again, and inside of an hour, we're off on a stellar, empty two-lane. One sniff of the real Norway changes everything. The Miata wakes up.

In any other car, 155 hp would be a laughable number, but the Mazda maximizes its muscle. It snaps to its 6800-rpm redline with a yearning pull, lighting the bellwether tingle at the base of your spine that illuminates only when you're doing something that would make your mama nervous. Mat the throttle in sixth and the car responds, a miracle of gearing that makes the constant press for higher horsepower irrelevant.

Someone imagined this machine. It gets those old ghosts going, the memories of Spitfires and Sprites and MGBs long since sold out of your life.

The road devolves into a tangle of perfections, each bow and sweep of the asphalt revealing a path better than the one before. One moment we're following the banks of glassy water, cool mist splashing onto the road from the snowmelt above, the next, darting feverishly up the side of some ancient and abandoned cliff, the glacier-cut valley below soft and inviting. The Miata can't get enough. The brakes are sublime, crisp and capable and impervious to the abuse of mountain bashing, the flywheel weighted just so for easy-matched downshifts. There's an electric power-steering system on this fourth-generation Miata, code-named ND, but it's so good that it could pass for hydraulic. I can feel the grit and grip of the weathered mountain pavement through the wheel, the tires chattering in one wicked switchback, then another.

There are tunnels everywhere. Nine hundred of them burrow through the country's cliffs, connecting tiny harbor villages that would take hours to access otherwise. So you go underground, and you might stay there for 15 miles. It's just long enough to forget where you are, until you see the glow of daylight ahead. Your mind's already preparing you for what's on the other side. Mountains, probably. Maybe another gorgeous body of water or wide grassy field. Who can say?

Tom Salts

But then you break through, blinking and bright, and the view's more spectacular than the picture you had in your mind. It smacks you in the chest like an open palm. The mountains are higher, reaching up and up until they terminate in impossibly white snow. Waterfalls start as scrambles of ice at their summits before twisting into torrents of rushing water hundreds of feet above the road. Your imagination isn't good enough to fabricate a place like this. No one's is.

Someone imagined this machine. It's no less of a marvel. The seats, the shifter, the blissful size of it—all lessons in the value of smallness. When was the last time you could unlatch the passenger door from where you sit behind the wheel? It gets those old ghosts going, the muscle memories of Spitfires and Sprites and MGBs long since sold out of your life.

The car, the scene, even the dropping temperatures seem made for this moment and this moment alone. Our route has us picking higher and higher, leaving the primary colors of the lowlands below for the charcoal passes of stone and snow above. We speed by maintenance sheds with snowplows bigger and wider than our car, twin impeller screws at their centers like patient teeth. Tall wooden poles stand at attention along the roadside, gray sentinels waiting to mark the edges of the pavement when the snow gets deeper than a grown man is tall. Hard to fathom from the sunny scene before us.

Tom Salt

The road contorts into a series of vicious switchbacks carving ever upward, and when we finally break out onto a straight stretch, we're in another universe. There's snow everywhere, piled well above our roofline. We've stumbled onto Galdhøpiggen, at 8100 feet, the highest mountain in northern Europe. It's as if the last corner spit us out onto the upper plains of Greenland. The ground's so white it looks blue, marbled with coarse and jagged black stone. A cross-country skier in pink spandex shorts trudges across the fields ahead of us at a determined clip. She's not alone. There's a ski lodge around the bend.

I'm having a hard time processing what I'm seeing. So are the skiers in the lodge's gravel parking lot. The Miata is the definition of foreign up here, and they look at the car like a lonely man looks at your wife. Not with lust, exactly, but with a mix of surprise and maybe a little regret, like it's a glimpse of another life just out of grasp. Prince can't stop laughing as we watch the car slide through the onlookers' iridescent sunglasses. He waves to the crowd, his goofy grin coaxing a smile from the girls standing there. It's all miraculously surreal.

We spend the rest of the day ignoring our maps and driving on roads that tear off into nowhere in particular, mad with fatigue and sunlight and the achingly gorgeous alien landscape around us, the rush of this car the only taste of sanity in our minds. We can't stop wondering at the absurdity of it all, and how those poor bastards at the gift shop will never see it. That's what Miatas have always been good for anyhow, prying your eyes off the horizon and forcing you to be here now, to enjoy where you are as much as the promise of where you're going.

Tom Salt

It's hard to talk about this car without turning into a zealot. It'll turn you into a street-corner fool, thumping the owner's manual like it's the only holy text that matters. The Miata's a wonder, a thing from a time when the machines we loved best were light and engaging above all else.

I thought those were all gone. Extinct. We live among the most complex cars in history, machines that contort their every facet at the whim of an algorithm—adjust steering, braking, and damping faster than your neurons can fire. They're unknowable devices, and you spend your time pondering what the car's doing, rather than soaking up your surroundings. This new Miata is good not because it's great, but because so many other sports cars operate under a different definition of good. One that means faster at all costs.

We take a trickling road off the mountain and tumble once more to the green valley floor. The light grows long and golden, splashing over wide water and turning the sharp ridges on the horizon into islands in the distant haze. It's beautiful, exactly why convertibles still exist. Somewhere through it all is a darker note: the hurtful truth that this is one of the handful of good days you're given, and it will end like everything else. The sun may not set, but the hours aren't endless. So we downshift, cling to what we see, and go like hell.

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