You know it is summer when you can drive down to County Wicklow for random Thursday. Nikki and I went to visit Dublin City Mission for the day, who bring their town kids summer camping to the derelict countryside of Wicklow. Everybody loves a roadtrip but this one will remain definitive for a long time!

You can't trip the road without petrol so we're waiting outside the petrol station for 20mins waiting for it to open @ 7am. I'm pretty cranky when I'm sleepy so when the gate clearly wasn't lifting after 7, I got out and gave my what for. But apparently here in NI it is common to close your petrol station for 4 days and I forgot that the Irish are telepathic and don't need mundane items like signs or notices to tell us such obvious things. An Egg McMuffin-to-go for breakfast and we're flying down the dual carriageway. Conversation is good, the coffee is good and traffic is good. We're driving in the outside lane, alongside a big blue tanker lorry and I'm explaining the concept of Transformers. His indicator comes on, so he obviously wants to move out after we pass him. No he wants to move out now. There he is moving out. His right side wing mirror is clearly broken. We break hard, fall back and wonder how a driver of something that looks like a space shuttle be so moronic. Had there been a car behind us, we would not have been able to break so hard and Nikki's car would have been road kill with us in it. What's a good road trip without a near-death experience though? We navigated ourselves really well and I tried real hard not to spill coffee all down myself the way there because I always do and I was wearing a white tshirt. 2 mins before we get there coffee spills. Rage.

On the trip home 15hours later; we were exhausted. Up since 6am, we left Wicklow near 12am and had 3 hours to keep ourselves awake. The news about Michael Jackson had just come out so that kept us going for a little bit. The roads seemed so long, there weren't many cars, no service stations and we couldn't speed because there were camera's everywhere. It felt like a snail's pace and our eyes were so heavy. But we get to the home stretch, the dual carriageway between Banbridge and Lisburn. And out of nowhere this sloth-like creature crawls out onto the road and THUD. We hit it. Full on annihalated it. Was it a dog? Was it a badger? A mole? It looked like something out of Lord of the Rings. An orks pet perhaps. We're staring at each other. Do we stop? Do we laugh? Do we cry? Nikki is a chronic worry wart so I don't know how she will react so I just stare. We burst out laughing harder than ever before. It was just too funny. That badger will live on in our lives forever, because he kept us awake that night so we could get home safe.

Thank you Barry. And we really hope you were a badger.