“Duh-duh duh da duh duh…”
I watched the first episode of Game of Thrones in a cheap hotel room on the outskirts of Front Royal, Virginia, a gateway town just north of Shenandoah National Park. I’d been a fan of the books since 1998, and was incredibly excited to see how HBO would manage to bring it to the screen. From the first few seconds of Ramin Djawadi’s iconic theme to Bran Stark’s climactic descent from the tower window, everything about the pilot was note-perfect, and I remember rolling over on my hotel bed with a massive, goofy smile on my face at just how good it had been.
11 years later we found ourselves in Northern Ireland, where many of the show’s scenes were filmed over its eight seasons. On our penultimate day there, we hired a car and drove up the Antrim coast. The views were spectacular, the sky was a glorious blue…and pretty much every five minutes, I found myself idly humming the Game of Thrones theme tune.
The following day, we drove from Ballycastle to the Dark Hedges, which featured in the show as The Kingsroad, the highway that runs the length of Westeros. Not everything about it lived up to expectations, but the row of trees itself felt restless and atmospheric in all the best ways, and I immediately wanted to run along it till I was out of breath.
Which I did. When we got to the other end, the rain stopped, and a rainbow broke out across the field next to it. With the small handful of fellow tourists having been driven back to their cars by the weather, the road was clear, so on a whim I decided to stage my own personal tribute to not only the biggest and one of the best shows of the 2010s, but also the one that took TV nudity back into the mainstream.
Naked on The Kingsroad? Tyrion Lannister would be proud.
