WATERFORD is the only county in Ireland I have never been to. A visit to the All Together Now festival would sort that.
I can't say that I have spent quality time in every other county, but I've seen the landscape and at least stopped for a coffee. I'm so curious about places and having different experiences, that I also want to put together an off-motorway guide to Ireland so I can avoid service stations on long journeys and learn a bit more about different places.
When I got my driver's licence, the first places I drove to were Carrickfergus and Bangor. Why? Since I started working in Belfast I had met many people from these places and heard them referenced frequently, yet I had never been. So my curiosity took me on a road trip. I wanted to inform myself.
Growing up in Tyrone, the focus was south and west, not north and east. I went for drives with my grandparents most Sundays. We visited Omeath, Monaghan, summers were spent in Donegal and north Sligo.
I developed an insatiable appetite to not just see as much of this beautiful island as possible, but also to familiarise myself with different places, people, traditions and accents from a very young age. Knowing every nook and cranny has become a badge of honour.
This is probably the reason why, when presented with options, I decided to go to university in Galway. Off I went on my own to live in a city I had never been to, and it would take me on average seven hours to get home, and that journey involved three connecting buses and a car journey.
It was the making of me as a person and shaped the rest of my life. In the words of Andy Irvine, I have never tired of the road since. My Granny used to call me the road runner. I could live with that.
A recent Irish Times poll tells me that I am in the minority. Northerners don't go south and southerners don't go north. These findings honestly perplexed me. How? I mean, how? Every second car on the M1 before Christmas had a southern reg coming north.
Don't people go to GAA and rugby matches and gigs in Dublin? What about Dublin airport? How else do you fly to the USA or further afield? What about the people who live on the border and cross it multiple times a day?
What about people who play and love traditional music? A four-hour road trip is nothing if there'll be a good session at the end of it.
Was this information collated in a way to feed in to the 'industry of division'? Or is it a rhetorical move by the tourist boards north and south to make people curious about what's on the other side?
I heard part of a radio debate on the finding of the poll. One caller said he would never have any reason "to go down there", and another said that she had never been to Portrush until recently. She added that she wouldn't be back. I wondered why this conversation sounded so divisive.
I couldn't get the image of the wall in Game of Thrones out of my head; the Starks and the permanent winter to the north, the whitewalkers and the Lannisters to the south. There are widely held perceptions about the unknown.
Some find the unknown threatening and frightening, to others it is curious and inviting. I fit into the latter category.
Leaving aside the north/south interchange, if we look inwardly, I wonder how many people from Strabane have been to Larne, and vice versa? How many from Coleraine have been to Crossmaglen?
I have always felt that a big part of the problem with this place we live in and how we interact with each other is an apathy about anywhere else and anyone outside our own little bubble. Navel-gazing and being introverted doesn't create a healthy mindset.
The pandemic and soaring fuel prices have forced me to look east, rather than west because I have to use what was on my doorstep. There's nothing like the road west, but recently, I discovered the beauty of Brown's Bay, Islandmagee and Donaghadee. Great for vitamin 'sea', fish and chips and playparks.
Surely the benefit of living on an island as beautiful as ours means that we will never be short of somewhere new and beautiful to discover.
