This spring I plan on taking a semester off from school in order to backpack around Ireland. My hope is to "ruff" it as much as possible, hopefully making it to a new city every night. It should be a wonderful adventure leaving things like technology and ease behind for a large amount of time spent thinking, reflecting and writing.

One only needs to look at my apartment to see why I haven't ever gone on an adventure or done something meaningful. In the living room my roomates and I have two Tvs, one xbox360 and 80 channels of cable and In my room I currently have a computer and an Iphone.

This is where Irish Wanderings comes in. It is escaping from materialism and embracing all of you wonderful people and all of the wonderful places that I am missing while on facebook and netflix at 3 am in the morning. This blog and hopefully you the reader will become my closest companions on this adventure throughout the Emerald Isle as I travel and share with you the best and worst times. All of this I decided to do a week ago much to the chagrin of my mother and a few others, though by now I would think they would all be used to this sort of thing! Whatever explanation I might give for this journey it is more than anything a call into the wild and into the organic richness which just isn't conveyed through the context of a documentary or even a blog! For someone who is an idealist like me it is Edmond Dantes escaping from Chateu D'if, and it is also Frodo leaving the shire.

Until next time,

Jacob