Hi Roland,
regarding your first question: the correct URLs are prepended with https://api.heigit.org/openrouteservice in the future. Therefore the correct URL prefix for directions would be: https://api.heigit.org/openrouteservice/v2/directions/. Our API Playground should always have the most up2date documentation of the correct URLs, i.e.: Dashboard | ORS
You can find more information about the changes here: Deprecating "api.openrouteservice.org" in favour of "api.heigit.org"
Regards,
Johannes