I bought a berth on a sleeper car heading to London (thank God there were open berths), dropped my stuff onto my bunk and went to the bar car for a much-needed drink.

As I thought about it, over a pint of bitter, I supposed there were a lot of reasons I high-tailed it out of the Highlands. My first impression of the residents could not have worse; that provided me with one hell of a lot of motivation. The idea of getting to Edinburgh and finding the same lodging problems I’d had in Dublin was not particularly exciting, considering that I’d already had a long day and I would not have been arriving in Edinburgh until around midnight; that probably had something to do with it. I also knew that I could return to England and possibly talk to a cute girl, and I have no doubt that fact entered into the equation more than it probably should have. Maybe it was Newton’s first law of motion: "Objects at rest tend to stay at rest; objects in motion tend to stay in motion." Maybe it was just the fact that the book I’d selected for my trip was Jack Kerouac's On the Road. However, I came to the conclusion that there was no sense in trying to come up with a rationale for an impetuous decision. And there was less sense in wondering about unchosen options. I was on a train, I was going to London, I did it because I felt like it at the time and for no other reason.

I returned to my bunk and dreamed of valid decision making processes.