A KILDARE MAN IN LONDON: A hitchhiker’s guide to adventure

Reading about plans to draw up a new transport strategy for Naas, it occurred to me while provisions are being made for walkers, cyclists and drivers, there appears to be nothing in the document for thumbing a lift.

Once I was a big advocate. Mainly when I’d left my car in Naas after a night out. Or, when nobody was around and I wanted to get into Naas from Two Mile House for a night out.

You just don’t see people on the road so much anymore.

Actually, the last person I saw hitching I picked up. I was coming from Dublin on the Naas side of Newlands Cross, when I saw him standing with his thumb out.

He was some Turkish fella touring around Ireland. All the way down, he talked about the military coup in Turkey and people he knew that tried to topple President Erdogan.

It beat the crap out of Joe Duffy.

In 2014, I was working for the BBC in Derry and, after finishing unexpectedly early one Friday afternoon, I felt the urge to head for Naas — only the next bus wasn’t for five hours.

If you’ve ever been to Derry by public transport, then you’ll know it is like the Hotel California in that it’s impossible to get out of.

I considered scribbling a sign offering to pay for petrol and standing out on the road to Strabane, but then thought the better of it.

My inspiration — a fabled tale from years earlier involving a friend determined to get to the Féile festival in Tipperary.

After standing for an hour on the Naas dual carriageway, he realised his chances would be greatly enhanced if those coming his way knew where he was wanted to go.

So he dug out a bit of cardboard, only he’d no pen.

The only thing he had in his pocket was a half-melted Mars bar, too far gone to eat, but realising it would make a perfect marker he daubed ‘Féile’ across it. Later, when Féile was done, he referred to the now legendary sign as his ‘meal ticket’.

In 1998, after Kildare beat Kerry in the All Ireland SFC semi-final, we all headed for The Old House in Kill, and on into a night that ran and ran. Very late on, another friend said his goodbyes and headed for the Naas Ball to try and thumb a lift to Nenagh. He was due to start work in the Co-op for 7am.

He got there too.

I made a documentary some years back about a Cork builder who travelled to Iraq to fight Isis.

He thumbed his way around what was then the most dangerous region in the world and lived to tell the tale.

I can’t compete with that.

But I do have a quaint memory of a return trip from Dingle in the late 1990s, when we came upon a car with a puncture on the way into Tralee.

The lady asked could we’d bring her mother to Tralee Station. She was going to miss her train back to Dublin.

So we did.

Weeks later, after a bit of detective work, the woman’s daughter called to my mam’s place carrying a bag of Budweiser.

What this beer bag-carrying lady failed to realise was that my parents had been on holidays during this rescue, and were oblivious to that the red Clio car had been for a long jaunt to Kerry and back.

You can understand, it took a while for the dots in their conversation to join, and another while to explain my way out of it.

Still, the Budweiser was nice.

Travelling from London to Listowel for the races in 2012, I realised upon landing at Kerry Airport that there was neither a bus nor a train to Listowel, or anywhere else it seemed.

It was a beautiful late September evening, so I stood out the front of the terminal considering my options, when a woman I’d been chatting with on the plane recognised me and stopped.

“I’ll drop you to the cross, about five miles away,” she said. “You’ll get a lift easy enough from there.”

When we got to the cross, the first car I hailed pulled in. It was a jeep actually.

“Where ye for?” said the driver.

“Jet O’Carroll’s,” I told him, “near the Main Street.”

On the drive in he told me he was the general manager of Listowel Racecourse.

Then he dropped me right to the door of Jet’s, and threw in some complimentary tickets for the next day’s racing.

Of course this way of getting around is long out of fashion.

But I’ve long thought that, with its low carbon, energy efficient stamp, this thumbing lark is the very transport solution that would be front and centre of any environmentally conscious transport strategy.

Robert Mulhern is a London based journalist contracted to RTE's The Documentary on One. To contact him, email [email protected]