day one. On the road. (Guess where I got that title from)

Another crazy day in Australia passes into inky dark night.

I write this from room 27, on 93 Auburn st., in a place called Goulburn in New South Wales, another new state to add to my collection, town population 20,000 odd of died-in-the wool Aussies and not a backpacker, tourist, traveller or Irish bar in sight.

We are in a motel room, about 25 euro each for the night, on the good side of tipsy with 4 cans of Amsterdam's finest to go and the lights off, tv blasting in the background.

My little Yaris sits outside, centrally locked and resting after the abuse I gave it today, which, to its eternal credit, it took like a masochist. I drained a full tank from it, and what use I got out of that tank!

The sun sets here at about 7pm. It's still on the chilly side of spring, but of course, as we drive further east, the temperature literally rises a degree with every 100km we gain north-easterly.

I spent the sunset driving away from the horizon and towards Sydney, on the glorious 888km of Freeway that some poor fool had to build to link Sydney with Melbourne, flanked with innumerable gory Kangaroo carcasses, and the inverdible interlinking and ever changing knuckle scenery of hills, dales, farms, trees, mountains, cows, solid rock, and a million other glorious things you will just have to come here to see.

I spent the morning, and the hangover from last night's Melbourne swansong, driving from Melbourne, trying to find a freeway, any freeway that takes us east, and stop-starting and shaking with nerves in an unknown car in a huge city the likes of which I have never seen, let alone navigated amidst 5 lanes of crazy, u-turns, undertaking, and the Melbourne Marathon notwithstanding.

A sense of power, regained from the ashes of my swift depression slowly returned as the car and I got to know each other and begun to flirt. I gunned it softly, making the engine hum and purr that just right mix between power and refinement. The noise like a small concerto, and re-igniting my love of driving that had been lost to me for the three weeks I had spent without my little Clio.

My average speed for the trip today, some short 8 hours of driving (Including countless breaks in those awful service stops that big freeways always have) between ten thirty and six thirty, broke the highest speed limit by about 4km.

I am immensely proud!

I think that's only the 2nd law I have broke since I came here, so it was nice to achieve something while I was stuck sweating and smoking behind the wheel hitting 140km/h in my 1.0 litre whore of a car.

The 3rd law to be broken, I hoped, was to be drug smuggling some herb across state lines. Nothing like weed to settle you into a new kind of strange.

We travelled something like 850km today.

Can you imagine!

In 8 short hours on a beautiful straight line, with no red lights, no traffic, no stop-start humdrum of daily commuting, just an ever present two lane freeway called something like Hymen (Hume I later remembered, but would still ask Sarah, the navigator and co-pilot, to find the Hymen Highway to get back to driving from adventure)

I stopped plenty, to drink water and treat the sunburn on my right hand that sears through the driverside window, and piss and work out the pain in my stomach from yet more too-rich restaurant food.

But here I am, triumphant!

It's beautiful, to start on something, and to succeed, and to enjoy it in the process. It's another tiny footshuffle forward towards success and achieving, amassing hope and conquering that cursed depression.

We pulled off Hymen, weary, into a tiny town, Goulburn that we picked at random from our backpacker book because of the proliferation of cheap motels. It sits snugly inland, about 100 odd km from Sydney.

And why, might you ask, did we not drive on till 8 and make Sydney? Because Sydney, at the moment, is covered in a plague, yes, an honest-to-god plague of moths, (The words of the local news, and not my own) Sarah's most feared of insects, and not something I enjoy spending my night killing and chasing for her security either. Though of course, if she commanded that they all die, I would be on the road to Sydney now with a fly swatter, a grim determination on my face, and some cans of insect repellant to take out those that flew beyond my reach.

But yes, even as I type I can actually, and this is no exaggeration, I can hear them, at least 100 of the flappy flitting fuckers, outside our windows and door, flying about, anxious to make love to the tiny light we have left on in the hotel room.

That's right. Even 100 miles from Sydney, we too are trapped by the plague. Pictures in the news showed postboxes, pillars, cars and street lights literally covered with the evil insects, so as you couldn’t' even see anything but a pukey swarming shape of what they were covering.

I have never seen or experienced anything like it, outside the pages of the bible or a bad horror movie! And yet here I am, throwing myself in the middle of it, and as I drive tomorrow, I know its destined to get worse before it gets better, but it's a fun kind of strange, and I am sated by the freedom of having a car, a direction to drive in, and hopes of a better tomorrow are winning out over regrets from a shitty yesterday.

When we finally arrived here, by god I can say honestly I never wanted to see a car again! And after the obvious first necessity of getting a bottle of wine to chill out the night with and reward myself for my driving, and why not, because dammit, 800km straight! From Limerick to Dublin and back, twice over! In a day!

But yes, I did it. I cut through a good half of our drive, that we have given ourselves 4 days to complete. And it was as if every time I ever got in a car, every lesson, passing my test and all was in preparation for taking drives like this, where you gear change and accelerate, overtake and undertake so much that the climate changes, the scenery changes entirely, and suddenly plagues of insects show up to spoil the party!

So we got our little bottle of vino tinto, Australian Shiraz with a pleasant bite.

The air in the place muted, the Rugby team just lost to the English, or the Poms as they are called here, with a newfound bitter vehemence since last night's result. And it has set in an air of hard drinking and depression, quietude and bitter language that we have little interest in beyond the fact that all our hosts seem bemused by it.

Of course, being Irish, or Canadian Irish or whatever it is I am, I hate the English, (it's not their fault really). I just learned that my far distant relations, some hundreds of years earlier in a rural Wexford town had fought them and survived a bloody massacre at the Battle of Vinegar Hill.

My own name, apparently, harkens back to Brian Boru, though it's hard to chase a lineage that far back, over myth and under half-truth.

From being at home, where I was forced to watch the rugby games with my father, I know because I saw it with my own hazel-browns that England were playing really badly, the Wallabies were on fire, and so how did it transpire that they lost to the old enemy? I don't know, nobody here knows, and the whole thing has upset an entire nation (except for the kangaroos, though you wouldn't know it, considering the amount of them that seem to delight in throwing themselves in front of cars).

So we checked into our motel, as you know. We were planning on getting hostels, but there are no hostels in town, and not wishing to reach the epicentre of the plague and venture further driving unknown roads in the dark, we decided on a super cheap motel. And that's what we got. It's pleasant in a shambly way (rather echoing the entire trip so far). We have a room with a queen bed and it's little dauphin, a TV and a kettle, and a shabby little bathroom, and after haunting the poor car so long with my sweating and bad singing to keep up my interest, I am delighting in it!

The first thing I did, before Sarah could even enter the room, was chase innumerable moths with a large phone book and seal off every open-to-air section. I got to 12 on my mass-murder of those poor winged lunatics before I stopped counting, and collected the carcasses and buried them in the bin marked only with toilet paper for their grave. The final crunch of their tiny bodies is a sick kind of satisfying mixed with the haunting shiver of unnecessary murder. When we first got here, we were delightfully unaware of the plague, so when we opened the door to our winged roommates, I honestly thought that the motel was infested, and not the surrounding world, and was all set to throw my keys back over the reception counter in disgust.

But here we are.

I think the moths, aside from anything else, have finally galvanised us against working in Australia, though that's always subject to change, and here, with everything so new, the plan (if there ever was one to start) changes daily, hourly, by the minute. But what an omen! A biblical omen to match my newfound hodge podge spirituality. Of course, its barely been talked about, and its all in the air with the rest of God's gifts, but what's the point, when travel brings such strange newness to everything, in stopping to work in some job that doesn't match with our lives or wants or hopes at all?

But in any case, its to my sagging mattress in our cheap lovely motel with the moths flapping at the window and a chill in the night air, to sleep off the hangover of staring at straight lines and gunning the car all day, and plan how to get to Nimbin, where the lore surrounding the weed and hipsters has us entranced.

Suffice it to say, I don't want to tell you anything about it, or us, or our state of mind, or the state of our travels, until we get there, and book some downtime with cheap smoke and wine to figure out just what the hell is the state of this trip!