My spirits were lower than a punctured ball: Uncle Joan had left and the weather wasn't helping either, with gray clouds and wind that tousled my mustache. We left at midday, slowly, like someone waking up after a bad dream. First stop, a nearby supermarket: Dad filled bags, I sniffed all the boxes without finding a single decent bite.

Then onto the road, and not just any road: we went around all of Dublin on the M50. Turns out it's a toll road, but without toll booths, so you have to pay "voluntarily" on the website. The funny thing was that when we entered the license plate, it also told us that we had some outstanding fines. No idea what it was, because to see it you need a file number and we never got anything. I just thought: "What a human mess!" and sat down to look at the scenery.

Later we stopped at a car park next to the road, in Glen of the Downs. There you can feel the fresh mountain air mixed with the aroma of grass and wet earth. We ate in the camper and then took a walk through the Glen of the Downs Nature Trail. There's not much to see, except for a curious ruin called The Octagon, an eighteenth-century building that served as a hunting lodge and viewpoint. Today it looks like a hollow head among the trees, but I amused myself sniffing every corner and marking my own territory on stones and roots.

We went back to the camper and left almost at seven. To sleep the previous car park was a bit noisy, next to the road, with trucks roaring like metallic wolves. We refueled water and diesel, and continued south, stopping at an Applegreen service station where Dad Edu took a free shower. I just rolled around a bit in the grass while he soaped himself.

We ended the route in a car park north of Wicklow, facing the coast. We'll stay here to sleep. Before settling down, we took a walk along the promenade, if you can call it a walk: signs everywhere saying do this, don't do that, watch out for this other thing... it seemed that every meter had its own regulations. I thought: "If I follow all the rules, I won't move an inch," so I improvised, ran a little bit and felt like the king of the coast.