Almost two decades ago we spent the winter holidays in Dublin and the south-west.  Apart from the snowstorm and the water pipes freezing up, (the riser went naked up the outside of the house), so confirming the weather event as an aberration, it was quiet.  Road traffic was slow, the shore line deserted, the woods primordial.  Today, in-season, the online chatter suggests that The Ring of Kerry is a different place.  Renowned for its popularity and consequential traffic.  The corners and turns so tight the tour buses are required to gyrate in one direction – widdershins.  Yet still the old memory wants to draw us down sou’westerly.   

With that intention as an objective, we head out of Ballycastle, turn right along the north Antrim coast, camping at a farm, waking to frost, passing the honey-pot Giant’s Causeway, riding towards the EU border.  Only to realise again, that which afflicted us two years ago on the east coast, is just as pertinent on the west.  It’s that devil: auto-inflation.  Inflated numbers, increased speed, engorged size, with no compensatory black macadam compensation.  

There does appear to be a love affair with the internal combustion engine.  Preparation for the NW200 is underway: crash cushions adorn lamp standards and brick walls, soft buffers blanket kerbs, viewing stands face onto the Baptist church.  Initially this confused me, leading to thoughts of southern US church overflows.  The median crossings have been removed, the pits are under construction.  It’s also probably the only stretch of pothole-free road in the British Isles.  

The signage on the way into town asks you to use the city centre car parks.  I assume this is to disuade the commuting driver from blocking up the suburban streets, for there are no ‘park and ride’ facilities on the outskirts.  The consequences are obvious as we try to negotiate a city retreat during the next rush hour.  Arterial routes are stationary, the steep side streets where cars park on the pavement are rat-runs in a miasma of exhaust fumes.  Any adult with a toddler in a buggy would be housebound; there’s simply nowhere left to walk.  Google-inspired, The Navigator plotted, but neither could see the two-foot kerb, the three-foot fence nor the fifteen-foot staircase that might have offered an adequate escape from a bane of putrid fumes.  

At Port Stewart we head down to Loch Foyle for an evening stroll on the strand, passing a police hoarding implying that ‘the rules of the road’ are applicable on the seashore.  There to find cars and their occupants parked all along the vast shore, practicing that great British tradition: gazing silently, intently, out to sea.  Those not in meditation are performing testosterone-infused multiple linked pirouettes: young males and their drugged-up cars must play; oil reek and flung sand drifting slowly out to sea.  Nobody is strolling the sand.  Vehicles on beaches is just plain wrong.  Is nowhere safe, is nowhere free from their ominous presence?

It’s experiences like these that can exert a call for re-evaluation.  Do we really want to debate, to negotiate, for our rightful space at the verge of the highway?  Fate, or my Guardian of Cyclists decides it’s time to intervene by dropping a hint.  This being the age of the app, a purple line materialises on The Navigator’s map.  Focus in and a name appears.  It’s an Irish GreenWay.  It’s 110km long. It’s car free. It ends in Dublin.  It’s the ‘Royal Canal’.  It looks like we’re now heading that way.  

Yet again The Ring of Kerry is back on hold.  It’s probably permanent.

It’s these sudden changes of intention that I’m growing to enjoy, the serendipitous solutions that can appear when you’re time-rich, and open to a change of intention.  You just know that something interesting will materialise.  

We take a ferry over to the Republic and head south to find ourselves on an extravagant stretch of fully segregated cycling infrastructure.  Ten kilometres of four-metre wide asphalt, motorway standard fencing, cycle parking, park benches, picnic tables, with gateways to the adjacent fields adorned by crafted baronial columns.  Totally over the top and it rolls on and on all the way back to the convoluting Brexit’d Northern Irish border.  Where it stops dead.  You  know it’s the frontier: the ATM only dispenses proper Sterling and none of those sovereignty-polluting Euros.

You’ve just got to love all that beautiful filthy EU lucre!