Travel? Might be an idea for 04.

The reading activity which shows Dervla Murphy and her travels on a bicycle in the Workbook seems to encapsulate the writing I would most like to do for this section of the course and perhaps going forward. It's the notion of 'experiences along the way' and recorded with a writer's eye for detail that impresses me most about this genre, and I feel that is where my strengths might lie. (Poetry? hmm, I'll take another look soon).

I have some evidence to support this with small travel pieces tucked away here and there that I have already recorded, such as my experiences in places that should have been holidays but in the end more closely resembled mini-adventures in for example, southern Spain, Prague, Slovenia, Hamburg, Helsinki, Tunis, Turkey, Cyprus, New York, Peru, Thailand, Budapest, Tallinn, California, Lithuania, most of France and closer to home trips to Ireland and the Outer Hebrides of Scotland, even the good old Yorkshire Dales. Each of those trips, in small ways were to me quite fascinating - and I have already written about them with my own brand of enthusiasm: the people I have met and things I have seen and done.

Now I'm no Dervla, that's for sure. I've had the small matter of having to keep working to pay the mortgage and feed the family, provide a home and so on. If I can retire soon I have much more to do. But, I'm sure I can dig around and find a few things from my travel diaries.

I once hired a convertible in San Francisco and drove down the Pacific Highway to LA then across the desert to Las Vegas a before breaking down on the outskirts of a dump called Barstow which was just after we'd broken down close to Death Valley, in 100 degree heat and short of water. Then into Yosemite and full circle back to San Francisco.

I've taken a night train from Bangkok to Chang Mai on a single track which was within bandit striking distance of the Burmese border in the most horrendous electric thunderstorm. And a freezing ferry from Estonia to Finland in a snow storm over the Baltic whilst huddled up with Latvians wearing knitted bobble hats and faux-mink coats, sharing paper cups of undrinkable tea and smoking Russian cigarettes.

I've walked to Switzerland from France up and along a mountain pass which looked like an escape route from WW2. And I've walked through Cusco in Peru on my way to Machu Pichu with a wife who was so sick with altitude sickness she had to choppered to hospital for life saving treatment. And that was after surviving a horror night in Lima where we were dumped by our taxi driver at a hotel in the middle of a slum area.

All these trips I have written about and could again for the purpose of life writing - even if I'll never quite be able to match Dervla Murphy's experiences. As they say it's about enlivening the mundane - something we all need to be able to do unless we're war correspondents, dodging bullets whilst disguised as women and surviving arrests and beatings. Then I guess we're recording the absoulte truth in as much graphic detail as possible. But wait. The Workbook does make mundane references to visits to supermarkes and doctor's surgeries. This is where the skill of the writer overlays the intensity of the experience. That's why writers always have something to write about. Otherwise they're not writers. Simple as... as they say.