Editor's Blog Jun 27th 2012
Road Trip
If you really want to see a country, forget about tour buses and their uncanny ability to hit every tourist trap known to man. Trains are ok in under developed countries, as they are slow and you can poke your head out the window. Stick your head out of a modern train and you are guaranteed to end up a foot shorter and cure your dandruff problem for good.
Motorcycles are good (not being biased), but you are exposed to the elements and you are more likely to die a colourful death, with that colour being mainly claret. Bicycles are good too, but unless you got a stainless steel arse and energy in abundance it can be a mode of transport that you either love or hate.
Although I am a motorcycle man, my love affair with the car started when I was seventeen. My grandfather sold me his mini clubman 1300, (yep sold me, his clubman). In the early eighties nobody would buy you anything, and you probably worked at the docks on a 12-hour shift, I was able to pay the mini off in a year.
The border was closed and all I used to do was drive that car in circles, so many times have I driven around Gibraltar I could do it with my eyes closed. Driving around with your eyes closed on a road trip would defeat the object, unless you are the passenger for whom the default position is head bouncing off the window and dribbling down their chin having succumbed to forward motion induced shelep. FMIS.
Not since wee Thomas Costigan and his best friend Cornilius Scanlon asked for a baked potato at the village fete in 1847, has Tipperary high street not seen the carnage I witnessed yesterday afternoon.
The trouble with Northern Ireland is that there is no trouble, at least not on the surface. Long gone are the days of running battles between loyalists and republicans, with the British Army trying and failing miserably at keeping the two factions apart.
