Road Trip

Unlike most Irishmen, who in my experience tend to come with a dangerously large helping of recklessness built-in, I've never been a natural risk-taker. I've always tried pretty hard to fend off spontaneity but sometimes it just creeps up from behind and starts humping your leg. As a result of carelessly lowering my guard in the Tourism Center in Dublin a couple of months ago, Sooz and I will soon be spending five days touring Ireland, Dublin to Dingle and back, crammed into a Landrover with two drivers and half a dozen total strangers.

I have a few concerns. At least one of our fellow-travellers could well turn out to be, if not exactly clinically insane, then at the very least the sort of bloke who drinks pints of Old Stoats' Scrotum and spends weekends with a group of chums re-enacting the Battle of Naseby. Other more likely other options for fellow-travellers, however, are Iowans in search of their roots, couples in matching cagoules who call each other "poppet", and of course, people who have decided that they quite like the idea of a road trip but also realise that their days of piloting the VW Microbus to Katmandu are over. People a bit like us, in fact.

Anyway, in an attempt to get slightly more grown-up about my writing, and spurred on by sporadic nagging from both Sooz (in person) and Toad (who sends me emails saying encouraging things like "write something, you arse") I've decided to keep a travel log and try to turn the trip into some kind of article - at the moment I'm trying to interest some magazines and newspapers in the idea, but haven't exactly been swamped with offers so far.

And, looking on the bright side, if the others on the trip are annoying enough I might even get a murder mystery out of it.