A good bike packing for beginners route is this one or two night loop following the Grand canal out of Dublin as far as Ballycommon, then about 35lm north by quiet country roads running west of Lough Ennell to join the Royal canal at Ballinea. From. there there is a good quality cycleway through Mullingar and down the side of the canal all the way to Maynooth.
Both canals have multiple spots you can wild camp on and there are two public park areas on the southern and northern ends of the eastern shore of Lough Ennell. The route along the canals is flat with towns or villages where there are pubs, restaurants and shops at regular intervals. The route between the canals at the Mullingar end is hilly with only one significant settlement at Castletown Geoghegan so you’ll want may want to stock up as I did at Daingean.
There are parts of the Grand Canal where you can’t (easily) cycle along the banks and will need to detour on the road network but its easy to exit Dublin that way so it makes sense to use this for your outward leg and the more straightforward Royal for the return until you get to Lexlip station. In the next couple of years the route into the centre of Dublin should finally be completed but in the meantime I suggest you go as I show in the video and get back the the city via St Catherine’s Park, the Strawberry beds and then the Phoenix Park.
I’ve a map of the route at https://cycle.travel/map/journey/487741 however as you’ll see from my video there are a couple of additional sections of both canals now passable that I couldn’t plot along that but are passable already with a bit of effort.
foreign Canal just past ballyfermot the plan today is to cycle all the way along the canal as far as possible to Mullingar well actually the sky Canal doesn’t go to Mullingar because below Mulligan but I’m going to swing up to mongar and it can come back in along the Royal Canal neither of the canals have complete roots that you can follow the Royal Canal does all the way from the Shannon to at least minute now I think it may be a little bit further but it’s still not complete all the way into Dublin uh the clan Canal as far as I can make out it is a lot more bitty this section here absolutely perfect like a way I’ve cycled it before for quite a few kilometers but then the sections that uh as far as I know there’s only grass it is a long distance walking route um but I’m also not sure how easy even I’m going to try and get the bike onto the grass and cyclist but how easy that will be it could be that the gates will be too small so we’ll see but uh yeah bit of an adventure weather forecast it’s good I’d probably Camp somewhere around Mullingar either on one of the lakes or I’m on the canals depending on how far I get I bought a spare battery with me but no charger this time to distance is 220 kilometers so that’s kind of interesting because there’s a theoretical possibility I don’t have enough power with me I’m pretty sure I do I’m you know enough experience with them to be confident because it’s not like there’s going to be any big Hills or if there are so it’d be a big surprise but yeah we’ll see how that goes on someday I’ll run this in time lapse so we should hopefully get the entire Journey [Music] if you’re new to the channel I’ve had a lot of content which is me bike packing the Irish Coastline and the Scottish islands and Highlands sounds interesting to you probably a good moment to hit subscribe but today we’re off to uh on the Grand Canal and then swinging up west of Lock and all to reach the Royal Canal west of mulga through Mullingar and back down the Royal Canal all the way to Dublin I’m cycling a Valley Motors tour you’ll find a review for there in the top right and as I said I’m bringing two 500 watt batteries with me which I’m very sure will get me the 220 kilometers or so it’s been my intention to try this route uh going out one canal and back on the other for a while but it did strike me that if anyone in Dublin is interested in getting into bike packing this is a very good route to start yourself off on as I knew I’d be facing multiple hard to power Skates on the Grand Canal part of the route I made the decision to leave one of my panniers at home and carry more stuff on the bike in the hope I’d be able to squeeze two more of them here we’re reaching what will be the first impossible instruction as I cycle up this side a guy on the other side shouts at me and tells me I won’t be able to get through so I come back down we’re going to see him chatting to me in a minute and then I go up this side initially this looks a lot better however if you look ahead we’ve got two gates coming up and the second of the two is going to be impassable um so there’s the first one but then this one there’s just no way of squeezing the bike through all right so I just hit the first bit that’s not possible on the Touring bike that gate behind me it’s not enough room to get the pedals through uh so the only way to get past it would be to lift the entire bike over the gate uh which with my rig I mean without unloading everything and I’m loading it back on again the other side’s not particularly practical uh so I’m not going to go that far bike’s too heavy to lift safely over the gates I I was having a go and then I thought no no this is stupid I’ll just do me back in so this is the first diversion to make the way around at a base uh about nine kilometers I think so actually I’d have been better sticking with my standard two pannier load because then I could have taken both panniers off which would have made the bike lighter and I might then have been able to lift it over some of these obstacles I’m still not sure how smart that would be because it still weighs about 20 kilograms so uh you might do yourself injury always still damage the bike so here I’m taking the Adamstown road then turning onto the Piedmont Road where I had quite a big truck passing me as you’ll see and then finally turning onto the lockdown road which is going to bring me down to the canal again at Hazel hatch bridge and uh then we’ll be back on Route more or less I’ve had a few uh encounters with very large trucks on the Piedmont Road before heading uh down towards Nace in fact uh so I think it’s probably a route that is used by trucks quite often because there’s a few industrial Estates and factories just off it so you might want to keep that in mind [Music] so that was my first impassable bit back there if I Delight a bike I could have lifted it over the barrier but there’s wasn’t really any safe way to lift a fully loaded bike over I’m back on the canal again though at Hazel hatchbridge uh haven’t been out here in a while so it’s interesting that there’s obviously a lot of people now living in boats along this stretch but uh yeah hopefully I’ll manage to stay on the route for a while there is another diversion coming up I can see uh and seeing as that one wasn’t even marked as a diversion let’s see what I hit in another few kilometers so we have a long stretch now running from Hazel hatch through salons uh up to tick Nevin where I managed to stay almost always either on the canal or beside the canal there was one nasty obstacle coming up which we’ll see just as we got into sounds uh some of this route is still under construction I’ll talk about that as we go along the Route and that hopefully the bad obstacle I hit will be removed some of it turns I hate to be pretty rough glass track although for that section on the other side of salons I could have actually taken the road there um and the only bit that’s truly impassable is once I get to take Nevin and then I’ve to do a bit of a loop uh coming back on a bit after eating Derry although as I explained I think I probably could have come back on at Eden Dairy itself or shortly afterwards and then Dairy actually also managed to stay on the canal um all the way to my turning off point uh so yeah over all in fact it turns out that most of the Grand Canal is very recyclable if not honest at least be cited for most of the length there are a couple of diversions mostly the traffic isn’t too bad on those um and we’ll welcome news the uh my map has this section here from panzerboy bridge onwards marked as impossible with the big detail but actually there’s a sign at the entrance apologizing for work being done um but at first today at least it’s pretty near complete so we shall see if I get three quarters the way up and then it just runs out but hopefully I’ll be able to get through in this place and probably fair to remind you again that this section is work in progress it could well be finished off quite in the relatively near future in which case uh you shouldn’t hit the problems I’m going to hit here and you know In fairness uh the roof track uh is quite excusable in that context of of the work actually being done it’s just this particular stretch I’m on now which actually is quite nice and smooth is the bit they finished off and then when I come on to the roof track in a moment uh you know you can tell that it well I could tell cycling on it that basically the stones had been put down it had been lightly rolled but it happened yet received its serious rolling but here’s what I had to say on the day [Music] foreign so I’m now on the section between Devonshire bridge and salons and as you can probably tell from the sound and the bobbing this is pretty rough uh it’s kind of travel with a finer layer of gravel on it but hasn’t really been rolled and in sections as you can tell it’s really yeah hanging me all over the place I think my 32 millimeter tires so on those it’s okay uh it would be brutal on a road bike so yeah probably wouldn’t want to be doing another road bike boss uh yeah it is a whole section that my rooting thing thought was actually impossible and instead okay half it now has a fairly good surface not completely finished it’s not completely compacted but it’s almost finished and then half of this uh presuming this does go all the way to silence is this welfare uh gravel large Gravelly surface of course uh you can probably do it so I’ll just give you a look at it [Music] foreign [Music] ly rough going but as you’ll see in a moment as I’m coming along here we start to get to the beach that’s very obviously under construction uh you know you’ve still got the sheds and things there and there’s a diversion away from the riverbank that’s going to lead me up to a gate that turns out to be pretty impassable and a bit of an issue for me and so here we have exactly the sort of disaster I fear after cycling a long way up a rough gravel track I find this case that there’s no way I’m going to squeeze the bike through so I’m going to try and see if we can get it over by the wall I’ve dropped a bag over but uh yeah really bad planning here [Music] yeah be crazy you get the front of it yeah ah it’s not easy to get through no it is not it’s a long way back thanks very much so that guy hadn’t come along and helped me uh I probably got it through but that’s a pretty narrow ledge probably a reasonable chance of me falling with 25 kilos probably of weight uh potentially Randy on top of me so yeah not great uh definitely now it says it’s under construction so hopefully they’ll improve it but it’s got the signs about bikes motorbikes that is and it’s a big problem council’s putting in and I guess waterways aren’t you putting in barriers that are uh in excluding motorbikes also exclude cyclists uh particularly anybody with the non-standard bike trikes Mobility bikes touring bikes any of those so not great once over that gate it was a short ride onwards to the pretty little town of salons where it was a good time to stop and have a well-deserved lunch break at the 13th lock gastro bar where I had Burger chips and a pint and that got me set for the afternoon and onwards so on leaving silence what I did was I took the right hand Canal bank route now initially that’s a good track as we’re seeing here but then it’s going to degrade to basically a rough track than a grass track and also have a couple of quite difficult to pass Gates uh for a lot of this length though is a good road on the other side however to get on to achieve to do a loop um around salons basically and then come back onto it so I think on balance uh you’d probably be better off doing what I did as far as Digby Bridge anyway um because the the other way it’s a bit of a long Loop and while bits of this particular track are kind of rough and as we’ll see in a minute uh you know turns into grass uh it’s it’s probably better than having to do that load Loop that was the river Liffey flowing under the canal by the way I think we often failed to appreciate just what an engineering Marvel built the canals were entirely man-made and both of them at various places of course major enough Rivers at the Royal Canal crossing the Boeing also on an aqueduct as you can see here the track’s getting rougher and we’re about to hit this gate which I got through but I left the camera running and you can see me struggling here uh having to lift it up uh the handlebars to get back out and over the top but we did this and we’re getting on the way again it’s a curious concentric Stone circles feature here that’s marked on the maps but not labeled anyone know what this actually does I think it must take water and that gets us on the last bit of the run to Digby Bridge as I said quite a difficult stretch and we do have yet another gate here a little bit of a struggle getting it over and a little bit of map checking as I’m trying to work where I am and what the best route uh coming to another awkward gate and then seeing the track ahead as rather narrow grass and I think what will I do actually I’ll go for it so again this is a pretty rough track you’re trying to cycle in that Rush now this terrain is very pretty but I was making pretty poor speed on it so I was getting worried and then uh much to my delight it turns back into a really decent road that was getting me quite optimistic but unfortunately just around the corner is another one of these Gates and this one I unfortunately couldn’t find a way over and here we have another one and this one’s essentially impassable because my handlebars won’t fit through so in order to get the bike over it I’d have to lift it up a good meter and a half let’s get that up which would be pretty tricky with that bike it’s pretty heavy I mean I could do it but the odds will be spraining something are reasonable that game is particularly annoying as obviously it would be quite fixable um but it basically meant that I was going to have to take another Road detour and a relatively short one thankfully towards uh prosperous and then across and then back down to attempt the canal again at the next bridge now unfortunately that was also going to be a little disappointing um because basically I got there and went onto the canal track and then quickly discovered that in fact it was not suitable as well so basically that’s me doing a loop and heading back to the road again and again a relatively short detour that’s now going to bring us onto a road that runs right alongside the canal for quite some distance um so that wasn’t you know I mean these are quite enough roads there’s a little bit of traffic on them but I’ve certainly cycled on worse so it’s not the end of the world we come back onto the canal again briefly at Robert’s town but here in fact there’s quite a lot of complex stuff happening with the water and the Barrow is forking off to one side so in fact we’re going parallel to the Barrow and then Crossing back over to contact with the Grand Canal again and this time when we catch the Grand Canal we’re going to have a long section uh where we’re going to be following it um on a road that runs parallel to it I kind of until we get to Eden Dairy this will be the mass the last major diversion we have to take you know again I prefer to avoid roads but they’re not if they’re not among the West Roads I’ve ever cycled on um and uh you know if we get back to the canal here in a moment although I must say this is taking ah here we go I was just going this is taking longer than I remembered the road itself as I said quiet uh only a couple of islands past me pretty Pleasant period of cycling and it’s going to continue like this uh basically all the way to tick Nevin um although in fact uh from Abby lockbridge uh there is a patch of quite rough gravel with a couple of um height barriers on them they’re quite curiously low height barriers you kind of almost have to duck when you’re cycling a bicycle underneath them but that’s that’s gets us down to take in heaven where as we’ll see oh there’s the first of those barriers um I’m gonna have to make a bit of a detour after going down a dead end uh the bit past the dead end I think actually is genuinely quite swampy and the bank is broken down in places but there’s also locked Farmers Gates and things in the way so if that was probably the kind of most impassable looking bit I was to reach uh this bit is very very potholes I was trying to dodge in and out of them um and hope I didn’t actually break anything but uh yeah we’re going to get through that and uh back on the route soon enough uh this stretch was also one of a few segments of the journey where I passed a number of men fishing recreationally along the sides of the canals I wonder if you actually managed to catch much in there in the way back in the Royal Canal on the Sunday morning in fact I spotted a few people that had obviously been camping out as well uh by it but uh yeah so there’s a kind of wide range of recreational uses the canals get involved in um and it’s all about ad hoc the main thing I took from the journey along the Grand Canal is it wouldn’t take that much work to turn this into a much more passable route and you’d probably pull in a lot of Tourism for small towns that could do it as an additional source of Revenue anyway here’s the dead end bit coming up this looks initially pretty promising uh but the roads about to run out and in fact what I didn’t realize here is I’ve got I’ve just gone through a gaze that is normally locked so I’ve basically backtracked and I parked my bike I course this on foot because I want to see if I lug the bike across the lot the lock gate is the way through on the other side I decide there isn’t I’m coming out and that’s the farmer who just locked gate and fortunately uh also unlocked it for me so I didn’t get stuck and I could Trail him back out uh like a lot of the the land of Glam the canal is obviously Agricultural and the canal itself seems to get used a little bit in both cases for watering cattle and things um but also obviously as as a route for tractors and for I would presume at certain times you’d also find cattle being driven up and down so something else to keep in mind anyway this is the end of the dead end and I’m now on the diversion which is going to take me up towards and then around Eaton Dairy now as we’ll see this diversion had some other peculiar aspects to it one thing to note actually about this stretch is that there’s kind of scrubland wood on either side of the road and parts which I suspect might be abandoned not very economical Fields but I definitely had the impression that it’s another spot you’d probably get away with while camping if you were quiet about it over the night this road itself is quite enough but the road we’re going to join in a few minutes is a fair bit busier but we’ll get to that shortly and then I’ll tell you all about the weird thing that happened next pick up the narration then but for now here’s Lotus ponds by akashis Gandhi to take us through to the next part [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] and so swinging around the back of eating dairy here’s where things are about to get interesting uh because I’m looking for a small Road I just missed it so I’ve turned back because I thought I spotted a laneway and I thought God it can’t be this laneway can it uh and apparently yep that’s what the map’s telling me so heading down the laneway looking at the grass going in the middle now I’ve done a fair bit of this in Western Art and so I was thinking maybe it’s just another Lane but then it goes into an actual farmyard have a chat with the farmer it’s a satin out I’ve ever he tells me I can get out to his front gate basically so that saves me having to backtrack uh and I back on my way road again but uh don’t follow this route it’s the wrong way to go uh you’re probably better off going into the center of Eden Dairy and checking to see if you can rejoin the canal at that point if not you’re going to be able to join it at the next Bridge down which is where I’m heading to when I got to this bridge though and I looked back the other way I could see there was a proper surface loading in the opposite direction so I don’t know where that Surface starts but it may well start in Eden Dairy itself so we’ve come back on here at cartling Bridge just past Eden Dairy and in fact there’s going to be a really good high quality cycle track all the way down to ballycommon which is where I’m going to be coming off and then basically heading directly north along like a lock and all to the place I’m going to camp and on the following day heading to Mullingar to link up with the Royal Canal but Yep this section really good an example of what could be done hopefully for the entire length of the canal it would be really remarkable if both canals had this sort of quality surface all the way out to the Shannon and then all the way back I mean you’d basically have a uh I think it would be about 320 or 330 kilometers round trip that could be done and I mean you could run an awful lot of tourist infrastructure off the back of that between cyclists and hikers both of which tend to be both thirsty and hungry and uh on a route that size of course also in need of accommodation um it was probably a good point to mention that currently the bylaws allow you to camp on the either of the canals for a period up to a week however they’re in the process of changing those and they’re removing that right to Camp entirely and and will basically just say that camping is forbidden well I’m back on some pretty decent uh Psychopaths by the canal coming out of eating dairy uh I had a weird diversion around Edenderry does an impassive little bit coming into it but the weird thing was it set me up a local road that increasingly looked like a farm truck and then indeed ran through the yard farm with the gates I talked to I presumab farmer who was uh outside his car he said it happened a lot but it was okay if I went through so I didn’t have to divert back but once you come down the other side of that head back onto the canal versus Eastern cycle pad now looking back in the other direction I think that psychopath might have started in Edenderry so if I hadn’t I kind of did a Lube around it if I instead I’d got into the center I’d probably picked it up there but anyway try and adjust the final version of the cycle Rouge so you don’t also go to the farmer’s yard um a bit of repetition for emphasis there uh definitely not that I’d forgotten I’d recorded that on the ruse anyway that’s the advice try and avoid the farmer’s yard um so on the yeah the bylaw lay changes um ice and strongly suspect this is an anti uh unhoused people measure uh basically they want to stop um homeless encampments on the canals which has been something that’s happened in Dublin and indeed uh a man was almost killed and left with life-changing injuries I think amputations after uh his tent was removed with a um a JCB uh or a backhoe as an American should say uh and and so the the kind of universal ban on camping is probably a side effect of that um so that’s that’s not great to put it Miley uh I suspect because it probably is just directed at homeless people uh that what will happen is it will only be enforced in the areas around cities and probably if you’re well I mean to be honest are they going to employ people to go down the camps down the canals at eight o’clock every evening looking for people camping five or ten kilometers from the nearest Village no they’re not same situation with most wild camping in Ireland to be honest there’s no camping signs all over the place but if you set up at dusk and you move on by Dawn generally nobody’s going to say boot you uh but yeah I think that’s a real shame and it’s kind of typical of the um poor attitude of official Ireland towards people enjoying the outdoors in a way that doesn’t involve spending money that said this is me stopping in dangan where I am indeed going to be spending some money uh it’s getting fairly late about 5 30 and I’ve decided it’s a good time to for to have a break for a pint which I had in the Grove and then popping across the road to Amigos chipper for curry chips so as I’m waiting for my Curry chips and battered sausage I forgot that the first time in the takeaway uh I think it’s a good idea to check the weather and also what time sunset is at and I’m rather horrified to realize uh that it’s in an hour and 20 minutes and I’ve got over 25 kilometers to go oops this is a trick an old trick of mine and I’ll talk about it in a minute live from the actual scene um so I’m going to ballycommon which is this stretch of the canal here and the path the good track does seem to continue on the other side but that’s as far as I’m going because now I’m going to be swinging North to make that connection to the Royal Canal it’s about 35 kilometers to the Royal Canal at this point up the back of lock handle um but I’m not doing all that 35 um this evening I’m doing about 25 and I’m basically aiming uh for the Jonathan Swift Park which is at the base of lock handle I’ve done my usual scouting via Google satellite view and it looks like somewhere I might get away with that kind of dawn dusk to dawn camping so that’s my common standard when I’m doing cycling uh because you know the distances you cover are somewhat limited so the number of places you can stop at somewhat limited and you can’t always get a perfect spot um that particular park though is a fair amount of commercial activity operates out of it there’s a kayaking Club there’s bow ties there’s stuff like that so from that point of view I don’t want to be hanging around bothering people during the day but you know as I said generally you arrive set up around dusk you’re gone soon after Dawn and you’re probably not even seen by anybody and if you are they’re probably not that bothered but uh now I’m racing through the hills and this bit of the router is the one bit where there are some hills they’re quite nice Hills actually they’re kind of nice inclines and declines and it’s a pretty interesting Countryside there’s not that much traffic uh on under the motorway there um and a lot of Agriculture going on on both sides so again I think this you know if you want to try a bit of bike packing this route isn’t the worst by any means you might want to be a bit ambitious less ambitious and distance and actually camp on the Grand Canal and the Royal Canal turn it into a two-night trip but anyway it’s getting late the Sun is setting and I decide it’s time to say another piece to camera about my current situation and how do I keep finding myself here I’ve managed to once more get myself in my traditional Racing for the sunset situation uh Sunset is we take about 20 minutes and heading for the lake of planning to Camp I think I’m not exactly sure how far away it is but I’m just hoping the location is actually seasonal because that was that or if I arrive and it’s not I’m going to be a little bit because it’s going to be dark and edgeway or something so hopefully that’ll be all right so as the sun sets I find myself getting to Castle Town Grogan I suspect you might get away with wild camping just On Again by the river there it’s another potential stop um and uh yep I’m kind of at this stage going I better get here soon because the life really is starting to die I’m not even daring to stop to look at my map to work out how close I’ve got um and it’s this final long straight shoot up towards us and I am indeed getting near and in fact as I’m going through this stretch here now I’m noticing that some small Woodland scrub on on either side that’s got that sort of standard queenship gate barrier so it’s probably also an alternate camping spot this is the actual Park itself I’m going into there’s quite a lot of activity going on still for boats and things so you know that’s the thing people do that until dusk I decide I’m not going to camp in the actual main car park on the grass uh there are a couple of Camper vans there but it just looks like there’s going to be too many people coming I try this muddy Lane way down the back and then decide no that’s not going to work out either hey so I ended up very tucked away in the woods which are just south of the secondary car park pretty much invisible in there managed to put the tent up in the dark broke out of my now cold battered sausage and Curry chips with a glass of wine and you know the thing is if you’ve done 120k cycling you’re pretty hungry and even that tastes pretty good hey the next morning it’s up at dawn and taking the tent down I also decided to film this uh because I love my tents and I got really skilled at packing it away I mean I put this up the previous night in pretty much pitch Blackness uh with just a little bit of moonlight through the trees to light it a very Misty morning uh indeed and an early set out [Music] foreign Swift Park where I camped in woods overnight uh I actually has a toilet that stays open so it’s always a good fries first thing in the morning when there’s a toilet available uh it’s funny how small things beyond the big I have a bit of a problem in that I bought the wrong cable for my iPhone so I can’t charge it and I’ve currently got 20 charge uh I figure if I get to Mullingar I have a good chance of being able to buy a Replacements cable or another cable um and even if I can’t I just then follow the canal to Dublin so it should be okay but uh I should have double checked uh as I was packing things oh dear and yeah so that’s it I’m gonna stop and put on my high Vis here before I hit the road because as you can see there’s quite a heavy missed down this morning and then hopefully I make it tomorrow and go and everything will be trans yeah so the morning ended up with a pretty heavy mist and poor visibility uh so it’s probably good I was on the road relatively early and there was pretty much no traffic I think I only saw one or two cars um the uh the forgetting the cables is uh you know that’s the problem with bike packing is you have probably a two to three dozen components you need to bring with you uh an awful lot of them are essential in different ways and it’s too easy to accidentally make a mess of one if I was better organized I’d have a proper checklist to uncheck everything off as I put it in on this occasion I’d actually just picked up the long cable type and not realized it until I woke up at six in the morning and went to plug my phone in to recharge it fortunately I am in the habit of putting in airplane mode overnight which reduces battery consumption massively in combination with low power mode but you are quite dependent on your phone these days for navigation so uh whether or not I’d have actually managed to guess my way down the road uh in uh down the road into Mullingar and then down the canal to Dublin and then for minute is anybody’s guess I might have okay so I stopped at the shop here to see if they’d have a cave of sale they didn’t but they very kindly uh gave me a charge so I got a coffee and a couple of sausage rolls and I’m now slightly better and I should at least make it to Mulligan so a coffee a couple of sausage rolls and a phone that was now a 30 charge set me back on the road soon enough back on the canal itself and heading for Mullingar again in the mist and quite a few people I hate it even at this quite early hour of the morning The Canal at Mullingar does quite a big long loop around us and you could instead cut through molongar itself uh that’s probably quite a good idea if you need to shop or pick up stuff but the loop around it is also Pleasant enough and that’s the way I decided to go on this occasion um navigation on the Royal Canal is much simpler you don’t really need to have a map at all because you can just follow the signposts that tell you whenever the track is flipping over from one side of the canal to the other it does that quite a few times the other thing that’s quite useful on the Royal Canal is having a bell on your bike because you do start to get larger and larger numbers of people using the canal for walking and being able to warn them you’re coming up from behind is useful because even if there’s enough space to pass them you don’t want to start a limb as you go by it’s just not very pleasant so I kind of ring the bell gently about 50 meters behind them so that they know I’m there [Music] so made it to oligar which is a big loop around Mullingar in fact this is all good it was 61 kilometers to minute uh 29 phone charge so I’ve turned the phone into airplane mode I’m just going to follow the canal down and then I might need the last bit of charge to navigate back into Dublin from the news uh if there’s a little bit of that I’m not sure about but I think as he does get me home yes I have relatively little else to tell you about the Royal Canal who’s because the navigation is so straightforward on it you’re on the canal all the way at least as far as minutes there’s not really any complications just do keep an eye on which side you’re meant to be on sometimes there’ll be a road on the other side but if you follow it you’ll find out it turns off the canal after a few hundred meters uh you know you want to stick to the sign posted route I actually did this previously in 2019 coming from Boyle um and back then it hadn’t been as well developed in fact there was one section I I actually couldn’t get through it all night one road to version to do and in other sections the um this surface hadn’t been rolled and was really tough going to cycle through but nowadays it’s absolutely perfect all the way down there were no problems whatsoever maybe a little bit of potholes in a couple of sections and it’s far it’s the far easier of the two I mean you could if you wanted to do an experimental bike packing trip uh just simply come up the canal that the Royal Canal that is from uh minute and then go back down again but I kind of like doing the loop and I would say that that Loop up the back of lock handle is well worth it uh both because it’s nice in itself but also it will give you some exposure to Hills without being too ridiculous and it’s a short enough connection it’s about 35 kilometers between the the two canals basically at that point but with relatively little to say for this section I’m going to give you some music again so this time it’s going to be body of water by track tribe uh both of these tracks are actually uh music that people upload to be used on YouTube videos uh so I want to mention who does it so they get credit for it and I’m experimenting with adding music to my videos after getting feedback from people who said they thought they’d be better let me know in the comments what you think yourself foreign [Music] [Music] thank you [Applause] [Music] [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] as we’re burning down the kilometers along the canal back towards Dublin and the Mist is now starting to lift and soon the sun will appear and the next track I’m going to put on is dreams of river ganga by hanu Dixit [Music] oh [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] I’ll shifted up beef for a few minutes with cold water by Patrick patrikos [Music] thank you [Music] thank you [Music] thank you [Music] [Music] thank you thank you [Music] next up we have Whispering stream by E Jammy jams [Applause] [Music] thank you [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] all right [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign foreign Sunshine by Dan henzig is going to take us all the way into minute and then we’re going to go a little bit beyond minute and you’ll see that the track after minute becomes a dirt track again [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] thank you foreign [Music] thank you [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] ly laid section since the last time I did this in 2019 from minute to here which is just the turn off at leakslip station it’s quite rough but you can get through however if you’re going to the city center it probably doesn’t make sense to continue following it here because it’s not it doesn’t connect through further down and and uh you can take them all direct route into a town through the park so that’s what I’m going to do now we’re going to flip around and head uh down towards the Phoenix Public it’s very poor that they haven’t GS created completed the Royal Canal route all the way into the city center hopefully that’s going to happen in the next couple of years but for the moment it leaves you with the usual situation of how the hell did you get in and out of Dublin without getting clobbered by traffic it’s quite hard I think this route that I’m going to show you here is one of the better ways of doing this and basically it’s going to go into League slip and then into Lucan and then across the Liffey bridge at Logan onto the strawberry beds down the strawberry beds up knock maroon Hill into the Phoenix Park and I’m going to end the route at the Phoenix monument in the park because that’s a good landmark that’s easy enough to get to if you’re a tourist or anybody who doesn’t know Dublin that well so here we’re going through Saint Catherine’s Park entering at the league slip end of it and that is running north of the Liffey and then you come out uh pretty much at the Lucan end of the park and that actually Skips a really kind of nasty bit of Road in between the two uh you know as you then get in towards Lucan uh tough gate there of course uh as we then get in towards Luke and um this road here there’s a fair bit of traffic on it but it’s a lot slower moving than that earlier segment is um and uh then you I mean Luke in itself just seems to have a permanent traffic jam and a particularly crossing the river uh but you know again that’s much less threatening to be cycling through then uh fast moving traffic on these narrow roads once you get across the bridge here and turn uh rise the traffic will get much lighter because generally everybody is going straight up that hill opposite uh there is going to be a little bit behind you for this initial stretch of the road um but uh you know generally they’re used to cycle us on this road because it’s it’s one of the main routes into the center and then uh though a lot of cars will be going left up the hill here and then basically there’s not that much traffic for the rest of it because they put speed bumps in every 100 meters very annoying speed bumps because they don’t have a gap at the edge to allow bicycles through so you will be going bumpity bumpity bump but it’s a final nice bit of traveling into the city at this time with the water alongside you being delivery and onto the motorway we go um and it does have one nasty surprise however I’m afraid and that’s basically uh when you get to knock maroon Hill because you’re going to have quite a climb to get up to that top of that Hill and now we’re back in the Phoenix Park and back in Dublin decidedly if you’ve actually made it all the way through the video to here make sure you follow the channel uh like the video and do all that other stuff that’s meant to boost it and do have a look at the rest of my videos there’s lots more bike packing
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Great vid