With many more people holidaying in Ireland this year, there has never been a better time to get off the beaten track and explore the boreens, byways and greenways of Ireland by bike.
Learn about great places to visit and things to do along the way, as well as tips on planning routes, finding quiet roads and packing those panniers!
This virtual public meeting was held at 8pm on Monday, 14th June 2021. Our speakers were:
• Louise Williams, Activist and Cyclist
• Marion Gaskin, Owner of Irish Cycling Safaris
• Mairéad Forsythe, Dublin Cycling Campaign Exec Committee member
• Michelle Hardiman, Volunteer with D12 Bike Bus
The event was chaired by Ellen Cullen and run by Siobhan McNamara.
Links from Mairéad’s presentation:
Slide 19 https://en.eurovelo.com/ev1/ireland
Slide 20 https://www.wexfordcoco.ie/sites/default/files/content/Roads/WCC_EuroVelo1_Mapboard_A1_Poster_v1.pdf
Slide 21 http://www.donegalcycleroute.ie/
Slide 24 http://www.thetalbothotel.ie/uploads/documents/View%20Cycle%20Hub%20Maps%20Here.pdf
Slide 25 https://www.discoverireland.ie/galway/clifden-cycle-hub
Slide 27 https://shop.sustrans.org.uk/maps-and-guidebooks
Slide 28 https://www.trailheadireland.com/Collins_Press_Cycling_Guides
Slide 29 https://threerockbooks.com/product/cycling-in-ireland/
Slide 30 https://store.osi.ie/index.php/paper-products/discovery-and-discoverer.html
Slide 34 https://xploreit.ie/
Slide 35 https://threerockbooks.com/product/the-adventure-map-of-ireland-folding-map/
Slide 36 https://threerockbooks.com/product/wild-ireland-poster/
librariesireland.ie Non Fiction (796.626)
Slide 43 https://cyclist.ie/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/FINAL-Vision-for-Cycling-in-Rural-Ireland-Sep-20.pdf
Books to read:
Brendan Walsh Cycle Touring Ireland
Dervla Murphy A Place Apart
Eric Newby Round Ireland in Low Gear
William Bulfin Rambles in Eireann
Paul Shannon Bicycle Diaries: 40 Days Around the Coast of Ireland
Malachi O’Doherty On My Own Two Wheels: Back in the saddle at 60
John Mulligan: Following in the Footsteps of the Four Famous Flannerys: A Walk Across Ireland from Coast to Coast Including the Royal Canal Way
there you go good evening and welcome everyone to the june dublin cycling campaign and public meeting cycling holidays in ireland and i’d like to introduce you to our four speakers there’s marilyn gaskin of irish cycling safaris and louise william who’s a cyclist and activist activist and um michelle hardiman who’s a volunteer with um d2m cyclobus i’m a racer forsyth who like myself is a member of the dublin cycling campaign exec committee my name is ellen cullen i’m vice chair of dublin cycling campaign and to give you um a wee bit of background about myself um i have done a few greenways and a few um topaz canal topaz with my kids and i’ve done the sum total of one overnight um in a tent with a tent last year where we completely over packed so i’m really four huge panniers i’m really looking forward to michelle’s presentation how the heck she does it um a quick run through of the evening so our four speakers will speak now after that there will be um a q a session and for about 10 minutes and at the end of that and we’ll wrap up the meeting and those who would like to join us for a zoom drink at the end i think um when we had the meetings in the central hotel one of the things we always really looked forward to was the pint or the glass of orange juice in the bar afterwards where we put the worlds to rights and had a bit of a i think almost like a counseling session where we all talked about our good and bad experiences in cycling i think that’s one of the things we’ve all really really missed so the old zoom session and drink at the end is really cathartic and a lovely thing and i’d highly recommend joining in okay so without further ado i’ll introduce and louise i think you’re up first that’s okay so louise williams and he’s going to talk um first take you right there louise and thanks double second camping for asking me to talk about cycling holidays i’m totally unqualified to talk comprehensively about cycling holidays so i’m going to talk about my own experience uh in its scatter gun kind of whimsical way and um all questions are incredibly welcome um so maybe just just kind of maybe a starting point for kind of how i could kind of explain why i jumped and just had to get on the road in sort of august september of last year was that usually i’d be working abroad a lot and i’d be traveling around rwanda like i was on the back of a motorbike i don’t know can everybody see this at the moment this picture as i come up the photo okay so i’m on the back of a motorbike and i’m taking a shot um of a guy who is uh pulling he’s being pulled up a hill on the back in i’m on the back of a motorbike he’s clinging on to a big old um larry full of wood and this would be much more my kind of lifestyle of kind of having adventures going on long treks and um and getting to meet a lot of people and having a lot of kind of experience and obviously with lockdown that kind of that was stymied completely which is what it is but um come to august september last year i think like a lot of us i just thought i need to jump on a bike and i need to kind of set out without too many plans so i’m going to be the kind of scattergun approach to cycling holidays without really a map or a particular plan but i what i did i mean i did plan to a certain extent and i had a kind of a sketch let’s call it a sketch of what i wanted to do and what that my kind of idea was try and get as far as um the route from newport to accola island uh from westport to eccle island and see if i can get as far as there but the first step was to take the royal canal so um i wanted a kind of a fairly robust bike so what i did was i rented this bike can you guys see it okay the yeah okay cool so i rented this from um moby moby move and i’d seen the delivery drivers on it and they always looked really relaxed and that to me was kind of a key i’m kind of a dutch style cyclist i like to stand up and sit up straight and just be quite chilled out with it so i rented um one of their bikes it just seemed like the easiest thing to do i wanted an e-bike and i wanted a fairly simple one um this uh so you can see i strapped my rucksack onto the back of it like no there’s no major packing involved it was just like chuck stuff in mostly books a few notebooks and um strap it onto the back of the bike and point westwards that’s kind of really where that’s my rigorous approach so i left my house in harold’s cross uh cycled to dermacondra and took a left and just kept going and kept going um and i think it’s worth mentioning that i did do it just enough research to know that when i got to deep sinking which is just at the beginning of uh castle knock it’s just after lock 12 and you count up the locks as you go it’s actually really lovely kind of feeling of the the movement through the landscape but when i got to deep sinking even i had done enough research to know that i needed to then veer off the path uh go through a housing estate and come out at cool mine station and from then the road the the psychopath uh heading towards longford it’s i think 140 kilometers in total is fairly straightforward sometimes there are some chips uh in the row on the path and sometimes out of cool mine uh there are a certain amount of kind of tree trunks that you need to be careful of going over on your bike but i have this kind of you know you saw the sort of chunky tires of this um this yolk so i felt fairly rugged actually to be honest i was really enjoying the kind of feeling that i could i was ready for any landscape that that the canal would throw at me i think what i wanted to kind of share was this i had this feeling that i needed the wind in my hair i needed to face out of dublin and to kind of feel that sort of spaciousness that kind of um lack of constraint and i think i just wanted to pick this picture up because i think one of the joys of going uh along the canal is that you don’t have to take out your map and check that you’re going in the right direction you don’t have to look out for cars and buses and traffic lights you just all you need to do is follow the canal all you need to do is when it brings you up on top of a bridge is maybe switch over to the other side of the canal it’s just this very meditative kind of reflective slow paced gentle way of traveling that’s exactly what i needed i didn’t really care well i didn’t care a bit where i got to and that i had a i wasn’t camping or anything like that and michelle will bring us up to speed on how to do that but i just really wanted to kind of uh go into that kind of revery of just traveling so i did book two nights in mullengar and that’s about 80 kilometers and i knew it was going to be a bit far but i thought i’d just give it a shot so i booked two nights in a hotel there and that was the only hotel that i booked along the way everything else just kind of fell into my lap um so yeah i just kind of kept going and the weather was fairly lousy and it was really once i got to malangar and had that night there and kind of my arse was quite sore because the moby bikes their the saddle is quite uh hard and but once i’ve recovered after about 24 hours of that i thought i can do this i can just keep going and there was such liberation in that so i didn’t book a thing didn’t book any i kind of knew where i wanted to get to but i didn’t i really didn’t book anything um and i know that’s not for everybody it just was what my mind needed at that point and i needed to feel spontaneous and kind of connected to that kind of that that that part of me that loves to travel so i don’t have any i i just wanted two more photos of the actual canal and then i’ll briefly talk about what happened after i kind of left the canal um i spent a lot of time staring at like i actually thought this was a stork but i don’t think it is a stroke now i look very closely let’s watch stopping watching birds there’s nobody around whatsoever but really kind of i really felt my mind clearing as i went i really felt everything sort of slowing down and connection to the sort of texture of the landscape and the changing texture of the landscape and it was just like it was really an extraordinary trip and and so unexpected i think that was probably what was even better for me with it it was kind of unexpected that i loved it so much so i might briefly and if that’s okay if i have enough time plus where i went to once i got to the end of the now okay and um and then i’ll kind of yeah you have three you three more minutes i’ll fly away okay brilliant um any questions that anybody has please do send them my way i’d love to and i’d love to try and answer them but i got to clandra which is at the in longford and that’s the end of the canal and i was fairly oh yes before i got to the end of plunder i got a puncture and and those those tires aren’t funny when you get a puncture so that ended up in a bit of an escape with a taxi driver who had to get a trailer who had to take me to a garage because only a garage could fix it but we were fine we were ground and um it started to bucket rain as well so few kind of escapades but totally manageable and um people were incredibly kind and helpful to me and got to the end of plundering actually couldn’t get anyone anywhere to stay there and it’s very picturesque little town and everybody loves it and and they were they’re actually quite uh frosty in the pub i suppose and they didn’t have anywhere to stay so it was bucketing rain and i went on to turman berry which is the next town down and i was really wet uh and michelle wouldn’t approve this at all because i had no cover for my backpack my clothes were soaked and it was just it was all getting quite sort of soggy um i didn’t really give a damn but um i had to have a bath i had to warm up lots of cups of tea and then i was just like okay where did i go next what do i feel like so actually i like honestly i really haven’t planned this i knew i wanted to go kind of keep on going west towards west port but i thought i’ll go up to sligo and go to the sewing baths in a skillet and then as no and it’s grown the kilcullen and his grown bads um which are one of my favorite places in the world so i could have um meandered through the back of the back rows of uh rascalman um carrick and shannon sort of hit carrick and shannon at one point through the back roads of leitrim and my methodology in virtual commerce was get out google maps look at it and then choose the side road choose the small road and google maps will catch up with you they’ll say oh that aegis is taking the side road i want her to take the main road she’s taking the side road so show her another small road and if there’s a like a strip of grass up the middle of it and she’s she’s going to take it and i’ll keep on kind of guiding her along i mean my phone ran out of battery repeatedly and i had to ask people for directions but generally you know i kind of was on a roll um and i met quite a few cyclists i met quite a few women who were kind of this is what i do i get out of a house and i go for a spin and it’s just so good for my head and just lots of sort of chat and and you know a feeling of freedom actually um and and i think this comes hopefully this summer we can enjoy lots more of that i got and it’s grown and then i traveled down uh from ennis has grown down oxford way which a few people will probably know the lakes there is just so beautiful and lush and then i too um to to i actually went to castle bar um and then from castle bar i went to um the museum of country life which i’d really recommend actually because you get they actually have a little section about cycling and which i was charmed because i was so kind of in love with the idea of cycling and cycling holidays at that point that i was like i even come to the museum of country life and they even have a cycling exhibition for me and um actually quite they had some some some old bikes and they had you know also obviously as somebody who’s a supporter of monthly cycles i really um endorse the fact that this is a woman um talking cycling in the country cycling the country that might have been me actually and then so from castle bar i’ll wrap up more or less now there is a small cycle route which is actually really charming and sorry from the museum of country life there’s a small cycle route into castle bar it’s really lovely and it’s a lovely sort of um taster almost for the route to um out to accola island it’s a it’s very similar in its style and maybe the engineers were the same but it’s quite nice and sort of architectural bridges and it’s it’s it’s just got a really nice feel for it you can feel all the wildlife around you it’s gorgeous and then i did the route that i’m sure a lot of people will are thinking of doing or have already done out to um island and island is beautiful but there’s an awful lot of car traffic from from my kind of feeling i didn’t actually really like cycling around it but the route out was was stupendous um and then actually from there i go back to westport and then down to to lewisburg which is a bit of a scrappy route um you know it sort of looks a bit like a cycle but it really isn’t and then down to lena and i came to a full stop i just there’s a storm in clifton there was flooding clifton actually and i was soaked i got soaked through just that number of times that you’re like okay i really i can’t take it anymore and and that’s where i called a hold and uh actually got a lift to go away and got the train home sorry that’s a real flat ending it wasn’t uh i think i was 11 days ago i’m sure one thing one brief thing one last thing if i could just mention because those tires on that bike were quite fast they’re not kind of they can’t fit into the earworld air and kind of standard bike uh stands luckily the train driver was like just put it in behind me don’t worry about it so i tucked the bike in just behind his um actually almost closing off his door but anyway look uh he was very kind to let me do it so that’s just maybe just something to bear in mind that if you do want to rent one of those bikes and take the train and you might you might come up against that difference okay thanks very much that was brilliant you always make um traveling sound so i don’t know like an adventure i i i i find i don’t plan things i’m just kind of stressed but you seem to find the stress kind of invigorating so fair face yeah yeah inspiring lots of people out there okay and you were talking about trains the next person up is marie forsyth and one of among other things she’s going to talk about how you manage to get a bike onto a train in ireland so your eight minutes start now raid far away oh you’re muted i’m about to share a screen just a moment till i find where i’m supposed to be going here show slides your slideshows disappeared um i’m trying to um this thing won’t behave for me so you have to let’s take that from beginning there right yep ah great thanks except i’m not at the beginning so let me go back to the beginning yeah that’s me marie’s versailles i’m a cyclist now we all know we should cycle because it’s good for the planet it’s good for our health it reduces congestion i just like cycling and i really like to say thanks very much louise you you described it all so well how nice it is to get away in the bike to get away from it all the wind in your hair and everything so i’ve been um cycle touring for years and years and years and i’ve done done trips abroad interesting trips abroad and well i’ve done quite a bit around ireland so i’ve done you know i i i’m a kind of um i suppose i’m a box sticker and things like that and i did miss into melon and i did a cycle across ireland and i read a book about a guy who cycled the coast of scotland in stages so i set out to cycle the coast of ireland and after about 10 years i think i got it finished but i’ve done and i’ve done lots of other exciting holidays in ireland so just want to give you i suppose it really is a fabulous way to go on a holiday and the great thing about cycling is the pace of which you cycle is just lovely and that’s what makes cycling such a nice way to see ireland or to see anywhere else but this summer it’s all it’s all about ireland so um here we go here i am setting up that that’s me setting off on a cycle trip i must admit that’s um nobody takes photography setting off in the psychic trip in ireland you know no no photographers in houston but that was in ross lair when i was about to go to france so there i am my pannier’s packed i’m not like michelle hardyman and this is what i want to reassure everybody about michelle hardyman will tell you later how she travels with nothing i’m a cold creature i need lots of clothes to make sure that i’ll be cold and i bring everything and i might get hungry as well so i need food so that’s me well packed up so um off i go um here are just a few photographs of my sighting around ireland and dustin isn’t missing head this is um somewhere up around ross mooc and this is the ferry from belly hacked passage east that’s on a lovely day that’s on a not so nice day in both places this is slade valley um which is just up from sagar so it’s only up the road and it’s a great way of avoiding the n81 to go up through slade valley as you can see it’s just a lovely a lovely quiet road and i was there on a beautiful autumn day um i’m retired here that’s malabar my god in kerry and i’ll talk to you about that again in a minute that’s um the toughest hill in ireland between phineas bay and port mcgee and kerry it may not be statistically the toughest but everybody agrees it is um this is out around north county dublin where of course you can go and get a train when you’re not just public transport and get a train up on cycle home or cycle up and get a train home when you get tired which is a great way to have a day out um this is the green wine blessing the lovely little greenway in blessington and a better one coming and this is just a very nice short cycle and somebody’s in the q a but outings for families and this one would be a lovely one for family um this is the great southern greenway that goes from near limerick to the kerry border out through ratkeeland and tabby field and we’ll shortly be extended to the stone and onto truly and this is the sally gap where with computer in the background where well you have to get out on a sunday afternoon you have to go um this is my daughter myself um it’s not a great photograph somebody took the paris on the roskill peninsula in donegal which is one of the best cycles in ireland in my view not quite as good as the bearer peninsula but we won’t argue and this is another fabulous cycle that’s my brother there on the left um near um not who cares loopheld in claire um that’s the daughter again on the green way in ackel that louise was talking about and that’s on the section from rani tracker sound which i think is very nice and this is just to tell you quite this is a quiet road in the middle of the iran peninsula in kerry um away from the main road on the ring of kerry and it’s just absolutely great and this is another quiet road in that area and that’s what i kind of really want to talk about first tonight is about how to how to plan how to plan a trip where you can go cycling and um i suppose unlike louise i do plan a little bit but i do agree with louise that you know you can’t decide before you go you don’t know what the weather’s going to be like you don’t know whether the wind is going to be in your face or at your back you don’t know whether or not you’re going to be fit as little and able to do 100k a day are you just going to be and do 50k so you know you do need to be quite flexible i think in what you what you do so you are dependent on finding places to stay um this is a map showing the euroville roots in our on the island of ireland and there are two euroville routes there’s the eurovelo one which goes around the coast and you can see there the bits with yellow are the bits that are completed and signed and the red bits would represent the greenways and then the broken bits said that it’s their own planning and then you also have the euroville route 2 which goes from gallery to moscow and includes the route that louise took on the royal canal which i think is one of the most fabulous canals and i’ve cycled on canals in other countries and i think the royal canal is the best um the euroville route in wexford has been signed and this is a map this is a map of the russian wexford that goes from rosslair to the ferrier valley hack and it’s lovely lovely sighting on quite rural roads generally speaking with reasonably good surfaces but another one might have great surface but it does keep you off the main roads and that’s i mean that’s the one thing you want to do when you’re cycling touring you do not want to cycle on a main road that’s just not a good idea so that’s the wexford one i don’t have quite as good a picture of johnny gaul but the root and only goal has been sign posted i haven’t cycled at all but i’ve cycled bits of it and they’re very good and it goes from newton cunningham which is near the border all the way to donegal town i think so that’s um oh sorry something going wrong here i’m going too far um sorry i have to something going wrong here i’m going to stop sharing start sharing again um i seem to skip into my um thing just go from the beginning no something gone badly wrong here um i don’t know why that’s gone wrong um but i i’m just showing um i’m just showing you various bits about maps resume um no that’s very bad um yeah okay i got back to where i was there are loads of books you can read there is um site there’s a um columns collins books have a series um of cycle routes that’s the so cleanse to one but there’s there’s one for fairies at all the senate areas in the country and there is sighting in ireland by david flanagan which is also quite good um i’m not i know you can see too much on my screen now but i can’t change that because i lose it um and then it’s there enamored am i on eight minutes okay well i’m going to say here use the os maps there is the ring of kerry where you can see the main road and here’s a highlighting of routes inland in the ever afternoon city that you can use you can get that on the os maps there’s also a very good series of maps and explorers which are cycling maps and they cover all the west coast western counties and there’s a new a new map out um three rock maps about all the sighting walking routes in ireland they have a poster as well can i just mention cycling on trains you can get your bike on the train if you see on the screen there i’ve ticked the bike space you’ve got to take the bike space and then you’ve got to book your bike on and the trick is to go to time when it’s not too busy and you should get your spa sugar at your space there’s me packed up that’s a heavy load light wallet and this is a light this is a heavy wallet i didn’t actually stay there on the light load and that’s somebody with the light load and that’s me drying my clothes which has to be done and the bike is a great clothes hanger and can i just mention before i finish the vision for cycling in rural ireland which was launched by cyclist.i.e last autumn and this is a vision where it would be normal for people to cycle and roar and learn to go about their everyday business that reduce quiet rougher roads with lower speed limits so that people can get around safely so enjoy your holidays folks great that was brilliant so i said that i guess it inspirational it’s not the wrong word it’s just a yeah you made it sound so exciting and i agree with you about when you’re cycling through a landscape and i’ve only done greenways but you’re taking the whole you’re taking in the smells the sounds you’re hearing the winds crewing through the bushes you stop and talk to people it’s a completely different experience to driving through a landscape it’s completely different we can come back to that later in the q a stroke chat at the end okay so next up we have marion gaston who’s owner of irish psychics fairies so you’re eight minutes let me know i’m starting now mary thanks very much er thanks amelia and ellen i think that she won is kindly going to help me guide my way and ellen you’re going to be my face which is perfect so and so that’s just us our slightly fairies and if you want to move on to one to the next one uh so basically who are we so we’re first before i say anything else i just want to totally and utterly endorse uh what louise murray had been talking about and about the absolutely incredible incredible holiday that is a special holiday and whatever way you plan it it’s a joy and a dream and and we are just a different way of doing it so we organize tours for people and we’ve been doing it for a long long time now for about 30 years and we started in california kerry and now we have 13 different set tours and we organize leisure tours which are about 45 50k a day and we organize sporty tours which are about 100 and odd a day and we do charity cycles half day cycles and so over the course of the 30 years we’ve kept ourselves busy with um just trying different things because at the end of the day we are utterly hooked on the magnificence of getting on a bicycle and the amazing journey that you have going from hd whatever way you do it and so if you want to move on to one next one so um safari actually is swahili for a journey and for us to know more than the other ladies i’m talking about it’s all about the journey it’s not about getting from a to b it’s about what you experience on that road from a to b and and the most important thing again that’s being said you won’t be on road traffic scenic routes taking in the nature and the little towns that you’re visiting get a little flavor of the place that you’re in um and over the course of the decades we keep thinking oh we know everywhere in the country now we definitely know everywhere and then and then we discovered somewhere new we think crikey you didn’t actually really know that place and we discovered something amazing and so we’re constantly being baffled and amazed by how incredible ireland is for cycling i think it has the most roads per square kilometer than anywhere in europe we have the we have the back roads that no other country in um in your past so creates an incredible amount of possibilities so uh you can move on to the next one so i’m going to do a little whistle stop tour of um of the tours and of the different places so obviously the west coast you know it’s um probably the most popular destination for cycling in the country and here’s some well-known places you’ve got the road um we’ve got apple island by kiel beach and the road from canterland by loch naflui we’ve got two ladies on obviously going through the burns there and even you know when people go to the borough and they tend to just stay in x number of roads but there’s a myriad of back roads that bring you to beautiful little burn perfumery there’s little restaurants overlooking parlocks um and it’s just incredible and the possibilities of where you can go um but if you just want to move on to the next one um we’re just just to highlight that there’s less known gems and which others have talked about leech room was common for mana and we did a group tour here a couple of years back with people who had been on um probably every one of our tours and um they have done everything they’ve done cork and carry they’ve done kerry they’ve done claire they’ve done connemara and they came away and said that this was the most beautiful tour they’d been on so i think sometimes as locals we underevalue um you know some absolutely incredible places that are so tucked away and perhaps don’t promote themselves with all the bells and whistles that they deserve that they should do and so just to give you an idea what you can see there there’s and the main picture is lucky and then the top one which according to one of our guides is the most beautiful cycle in ireland it’s glenev horseshoe which is the northern side of then bulban absolutely incredible road so close to sligo and passing by then car waterfall afterwards gill and and what sort of amazed us was the amount of lakes that are in the trump and then there’s you can see the stairway to heaven the 450 steps of a boardwalk right up to a viewing platform so i suppose what we bring is that you know over years and years and years we’ve we’ve kind of mapped out little roots that take you from a to b every day um and we just take the hassle a little bit out of it not that it is hassle because it is a joy but we’re just mapping out look and you go here and now nip down here there’s always extra little loops you can do to be honest with flashing rain we organize your luggage to be transferred every day to a new guest house so sometimes people just jump in the taxi and make their way to destination b and just relax there for a little bit so and a little bit of pampering to be honest with you um so then the next slide is uh so obviously the south is a massive destination and again you know the possibility for tours are endless there’s um people there obviously in duncan beach and like kate carney’s cottage and a lady taking a picture by the lakes of clarny and somebody at sleep sleigh head so again you know we’re we’re sitting our back door is the most beautiful place honestly i think in europe and i’m lucky enough that we organized saturday tours actually all over europe and every time i go to i come on an irish tour i just blows me away the scenery that we have and the back roads we have and the little villages we have and the guest houses we have and the pubs and restaurants we can go to and so if you want to move on and but again these are just to highlight some of the little known gems and i’m with you right on the bear peninsula i think it is absolutely stunning uh was i i would put that in except i think it’s becoming a little more known now so i went instead for a photo on the top right of the sheets head peninsula it’s little baby sister just south of it which is uh equally i can see you not equally beautiful um but for me one of the real gems down them and the south around by gordon carey is glue gunbarra and it stuns me how few people i i talk about guggenbauer endlessly to people and how people don’t know it as much as they should it is for me it’s a glacial lake the source of the river lee and we bring so many chores here and it is just magical i i can’t find a picture at the bottom two pictures of goo gone but it’s hard to find a picture that really captures its absolute magnificence as you come through this windy little road and the valley just opens out in front of you it is beautiful incredible and if you do nothing this year or next year it’s find a way to make your way to google which is in west court um but again so yeah we have a little hotel there that we bring people to it’s gorgeous and so moving on to the next light and then moving around switzerland around the country but the southeast which um again some little gems a place that i really only became aware of probably about 15 years ago maybe it was the copper coast a place that hadn’t really um taken too much heat for and it’s magnificent it’s a beautiful beautiful stretch of coastline going from dungarvan to kind of tremor to maurice sort of direction um absolutely magnificent a roller coaster ride but it is worth it absolutely worth it and then we got um on the bottom right and my little fella cycling the waterford greenway which uh we did and it was such an amazing day out for a family and then you’ve got hooked your point abby new greenway coming into court and i guess i suppose it’s just another way of doing it is that um because we just spent so long on the road and we’ll hopefully you know just cut around and say look just you need to go here you need to knit here and try to be obviously you know as flexible as possible adding extra loops in if you’re feeling a bit more adventurous showing you that eight minutes there okay well they jump it two more seconds and i’ll crack on then shivon then finally all of this is my last slide ellen you’ll be delighted uh this is the anterior coastline so i just wanted to whistle stuff up to answer again a place that always amazes me um that i talk to people and it’s not as has traveled and it’s so close to us and it’s absolutely gorgeous and it’s a lot more to it than the giants causeway you know beautiful um tour head there on the right hand side so i suppose hopefully i’ve given you a flavor of the magnificence of what ireland is and um for us we just make a little bit easier i suppose because we’re a book and accommodation moving luggage and sometimes i think it’s kind of like we all have the ingredient ingredients for baking bread in our cupboard but sometimes you just want somebody else to do it for you and that’s a little bit what it is so that’s it mary that was fabulous i’m sorry i hate i hate russian people i hate that i have to respect actually i’d love to hear all of you talk for an hour but we promised people would keep the whole thing about there so i have to keep beating with people with sticks and i feel really bad those pictures are amazing and oh i i i’m not um verbose enough to kind of put into words how inspiring all your talks are gorgeous okay michelle now michelle is our actor our traveler on the road she’s actually up in north mayo at the moment it’s like thing and michelle um is going to talk to us now and um then i’m going to show that you want to show the video now michelle first or do you want to do a little intro first oh can whoops my videos i’m muted yeah so i’m just i’ve just arrived about an hour ago in east keep here and i’ve just set up camp here my tent is behind me there and i have uh iski castle and a beautiful beautiful sunset i haven’t had a whole lot of sun in the last week touring on the west coast um but the surfers have just come out on esky um surfing beach i have never been here before and it’s it’s really nice so yeah if you want to go ahead with the video i wasn’t sure if the technology would have been good enough so i sent that through in advance my name is michelle and i live in crumlin in dublin i was asked by ellen and murray of the cycling campaign would i take part in the monthly meeting presentation i’m actually on tour at the moment between sligo and esky i’m on my way out to belmont so i just thought instead of hoping to get some wi-fi on monday evening at eight o’clock i just take a little video of my setup on the bike and send that through and then it’s not so dependent on technology so i’ve been bike touring for about 20 years it started in germany and that’s what germans do for their holidays and so i’ve taken the loaf back to ireland and i just wanted to explain the type of bike i tour with you don’t need something this fancy i started with a regular uh rally with i don’t know 20 beers but i’ve since upgraded and spent a little bit of money on a steel bike so it’s particularly uh the real workhorse and it’s particularly good when you’re out in the middle of nowhere in deepest darkest south america in a desert environment and you don’t want anything to break um i always use ortlieb panniers so there are these two bags of the back and i’ve these guys are probably 15 years old each of them they clip on there’s a clip-on mechanism whereby you lift this up and it lifts off the rack um and the types of things i bring in my panniers they’re very wartproof these artely bags and also you can get them repaired so when they get a bit i post them back to the uk and um they send them back to be repaired and i always keep the same things in the bag so i have a yellow one on this side which i always keep my camping gear in and then whoops the bike’s going to fall over because i’ve just taken this bike out this bag off and then i always have kind of my stuff in this one and i have a small food bag and the types of things i would have in a food bag at any one time is always some porridge because that’s my morning and when i cook and then maybe couscous maybe a bit of pasta and a couple of bits of veg um i always take them two dry bags one for clothes just any old dry clothes and one for underwear it’s very important to have clean underwear on the road and then a bag of chicks i’ve just totally made this on stair books let me twist this and sleep okay there we go and a bag of tricks that i would take in a ziploc would include a head torch for when i’m camping bungee cord to stick things on the back and what else do i have in here and a pen knife so they’re like my bag of clicks i’ll just pop them over here then in the earthly the secondary bag i use different colors because i like knowing there’s a colour scheme going on and the camping is always in my yellow camping will be a rolled up therm-rest mattress it’s pretty squeezed in i rolled up thermarest mattress and i’ve had this for 10 or 12 years it’s flying and at the moment it’s summer so i’m i have a three season sleeping bag i travel with a memory foam pillow and a stretchy sleeping bag liner which means i can camp and i don’t have to really ever wash my sleeping bag i just um washed the sheet i have a pump in there as well and then on top of that sits usually my pots and pans and um an amazon stove so that’s a petrol stove and i’ve used a petrol stove for years i’ve had the semi-sour stove for years and the reason i use it i guess is that the availability of actual petrol is very very cheap and you can get it everywhere and the petrol i will store in this bottle it’s a stainless steel bottle which will sit on the bottom bracket so that’s for um mainly cooking apart in the mornings and then something with a bit of rice or lentils in the evening over campfire um a touring bike a proper touring bike will often have multiple cages for the bottles so i have water here and petroleum this one is just two cages at the moment um a helmet i’d always have with me and then my particular touring bike has a section here it’s called a t-bar it’s an extra bar which fits the handlebar bag so having a handlebar bag somewhere different means that i have kind of access to my whole um handlebars here on top for things like maybe a garment if you want to go that way i don’t generally use one but um i have a tracker that will tell me what speed i’m going in what distance and in my handlebar bag then i’ll have um some cream and at the moment i have a mask a bag of tricks a bandana multiple uses and an eye mask very important for camping and some wax earplugs also means you can camp near anything kind of noisy and my well addition this summer is my tree and shrub identifier from biodiversity ireland and because now i’ve started looking at what types of trees we have in ireland i never knew before so i am hoping to tour this summer and with my biodiversity tracker and learn something about the trees we have and sunglasses in there and the lock and that clips back on and yeah and that’s kind of me i have a stand which is really really handy it’s a stand that will withstand quite a lot of weight so even if i have the two panniers on the back and the stand will hold i travel always even though i travel alone or with friends i’m a two-man sleeping bag which is really luxurious because there’s enough room for me plus all my stuff inside i’ll take the two panniers inside with me um at night um and that’s about it that’s anything extra this oh yeah i’m trying trialling a i got a present from a friend of a collapsible tupperware container so that’s great if i cook something on the stove the night before i’ll use it for lunch the next day and when i’m not using when it’s not holding food for my lunch it falls down nice and small and then this is a four liter orchard water bladder i guess you’d call it so and again when you’re not using it holds very really small but before i get to camp at night or before i try because i usually while camp i’ll always try and find a little dune beside a beach if i can and i might fill it up at a pub or a petrol station with fresh water that i will use for drinking and for cooking during the night and for part the next morning so the other little gizmos and that’s reddish so um i hope anybody watching this i i appreciate that this is maybe an advanced enough setup for touring and certainly in ireland and i can go for multiple weeks with this amount of stuff one change two changes of clothes spare pair shoes and some sun cream um and then for longer distance trips i might put um two extra smaller bags on the front but in ireland for the summer i wouldn’t do any more than this so enjoy and thanks for the opportunity and hope you have a lovely meeting and maybe er i’ll just show you this is just the bike i talked a little bit about my bike it’s tucked in behind my friend’s bike and i have a steel torn sherpa bike which is it’s actually handmade for me and in the uk it’s steel they’re a bit more robust steel bikes than maybe an aluminium bike but um for any touring you would do in ireland an ordinary aluminium bike is as good as you will need and the one thing you will need is a decent rack on the back if you want to take panniers and the only reason for i suppose even if you’re going on a day trip you’ll take maybe one sort of a bag i i much prefer to have the panniers either side of the rack instead of a backpack because i just don’t like having um anything on my back i use orange sleeve uh panniers i don’t have one just there i do have my orcleave handlebar bag here and marion will be very well used she may well rent out or cheap beer it’s german it’s a german brand and this particular handlebar bag is probably 25 years old and it’s the first ever handlebar bag i’ve used it’s clipped in there into my bicycle on an extra t-bar under my handlebars and that just gives me extra room on my handlebar for things like my bell for my d12 bike bus and um a little bit of a technology just i have a very ordinary old pedometer thing that tells me how many kilometers i’ve gone and what speed i’m at um i have a brook saddle on my bike it’s my third brook saddle made in the uk they’re leather saddles again it’s a very high end saddle but i do a lot of cycle touring so i want to be very comfortable and any old saddle is is grounds that would come on a standard bike and and i suppose the type of touring i do i i go with the panniers full one pannier will always have my camping gear that will be a mat a thermarest mat i use and various sleeping bags so for a lot of the cycling in ireland i do i carry a four season sleeping bag because i like to be really really warm so maybe just now june july august i’ll have a three season set up that’s my tent over there parked in the middle of a grassy meadow and i used to cycle with an msr um yellow tent but i found out that my msr hubba hubba green tent is much better for camouflage um i’ve easty castle in the background you can see by the flag it’s blowing a gale so i suppose when i am camping i just love to camp with the bike i know other people like to book things in advance i hate to book anything in advance i want to be totally flexible and i go with my mood i go with the wind if it’s in my face i’ll do 20 caves behind my back i can do 100k and it depends on who i meet i just i like to go with you know and just ask for a bit of local knowledge as i go along my journey so today um spent an hour in ballast a dare because i ended up chatting to fisherman who just happened to catch a salmon right in front of my eyes and i’ve never seen the famine caught and we just got chatted so you have that flexibility with the bike that those little golden moments you then can either stay or you can go and again if it’s raining all i ever want is to get inside the pub and be you know change my clothes and be warm and so it just as as the other speakers have all said the flexibility you get with the bike sense freedom for me it’s very very cheap i’m always on a low low budget and so i popped into pudding row and esky it’s a really really famous new little shop and you know it doesn’t matter how much money i spent in pudding row i i loaded up and got really nice dinner that i heated up on the stove just there and i bought some stuff for breakfast i don’t care how much i spend on the food because my accommodation is free and and then i also love to see swim so i suppose out on the bike and i won’t see a swim now and there the the waves are pretty crazy um but around the other side there’s a what what should i find a polygorum it’s called janiski so it’s a little kind of man-made swimming pool and in in the beachfront anyway so i was going to talk about how i my little video shows how i pack them the the panniers and what i put in them um i always have just one little bag um of kind of gizmos which would be a head torch um for putting the tent up maybe when it’s darker and wax earplugs were a revelation when i found them it means you can camp right beside a really noisy uh beach like that is there and and still fall asleep because i find that those type of ways really noisy um an eye mask i have a really good eye mask and you need it in ireland in the summer because it’s bright from 4 4 30 in the morning and a really good eye mask that actually sits over your eyes it doesn’t sit flat on your eyes and which means that you can blink in the night in the tent and it doesn’t wake you up just little tiny little things that over the years you learn and and then something a term of something so whether it’s a one meter flask or whether it’s a small thermos mug and when i cook dinner at night or my porridge in the morning and before i turn the stove off i’ll always fill up a thermos mug so that i have something hot in case and you need it for the journey so i’m probably out at least five minutes i’ll i’ll shut up but uh greetings from northern sligo and i know joan you’re on the call there i think this is your home turf sligo it’s beautiful and i haven’t toured much here um and thanks to marion also who pointed out that that routine uh around belle goldman and over to lock gill i i had my thinking cap on when you mentioned that so i might scoot over there before i go home so thanks for that thank you very much and you’re actually one minute under there you go and we’ll see if we can find some way when we put up the youtube video some way of tagging on your video because the video was so well done and so informative there’s a shame for it to be to not to be seen so we’ll see if we can tag that onto the video so onto the video somewhere so okay so that’s the four speakers now and so now we’ll go on to the q a and i have a few questions here already um first question from cl um claudia is there a cycling trip you can do with the young family so has anybody any of the speakers any experience of cycling with smaller children or anything right have you you do anything with your kids when they were smaller well they didn’t really like exciting when they were smaller and then and then i did bring i did bring them bring rory cycling and go gunbarra and he moaned all the way up the hills i said it’ll be great when you get to the top of the hill and we took off from the top of the hill and he fell and broke his head i don’t know what the nose was broke but anyway it was a traumatic experience but i think the green rays are the place to go with young children um you’ve got you know the ones we all talk about like the great western greenway and the waterford agreement that but you’ve also got smaller little greenways like one up in carniverton there’s one um in near acres lake in litrum and any of the greenways really are suitable for young children and i found that i remember we stayed in westport house campsite a few times and there was kind of a back road out of the campsite that you could cycle on with the kids and and you could go to the road beyond that it was okay so definitely try the greenways but also you know when you get deep into the heart of rory lourdes and you can find very quiet roads but you know you need to check the merchants out before you bring the children on them are we able to go in there i’m married after that i don’t have any experience with young kids but um you might think a claudia of like getting um getting a train to leak slip and then cycling to manufa and then getting the train i don’t know where you’re based but like doing a chunk of that commuter train route where you don’t need to have you don’t need to and under custody was asking there about booking you know a seat for a place for your bike like you don’t when you’re on the commuter route you don’t need to do that you just jump on at the weekend you just jump on the train so that might be like an adventure for the kids but not a very you know another huge challenge for them and so that might be an idea i i was out in manufacturing last weekend um a psycho that from dublin and then we actually cycled through carton house and back to league slip and got the train from lee slip back to dublin so you might kind of play around with those ideas and that might be um a start and marion you wanted to come in as well yeah another great place um is claire actually because as raid is saying it’s great for the back roads so you’ve got all that you’ve got a ton of quiet back roads the villages aren’t that far apart so it’s not big cycling so you can easily lure it’s only a little bit you’ve got caves you’ve got the iron islands you can go out for a day trip you’ve got the coast you’ve got the baron there’s a ton of stuff i know that you need to keep planning we’ve got two young boys you need to keep planning we’re going to stop no we’ll stop soon and we’ll stop hearing me stop there so i would say definitely for me i would go i would look at claire really seriously brilliant thank you i said yeah we did there in ireland with our four kids two years ago and it was magical and bordering on a curfew island it was a like a cycling utopia okay the next question is from oliver calicon a friend of mine turns out what’s the best lightweight portable easy to put up that’s a lot of questions i love so i’m tent for solo camping um would that be for michelle michelle king are you still here can you hear that i’m ready i’m here so what’s what’s your what’s your judgment on that so i am um i have always bought emmaus or hubba hubba tents you can buy an msr hubba which is one man an msr hubba hubba which is two man or an msr motherhood which is a three man and and the reason i like them they’re lightweight my one here particularly is 1.9 kilos and it has two doors so like first i’m traveling with a friend at the moment so we will sleep side by side and then we will both have a porch and a door where we can put our panniers which is really really nice for uh cycle touring there’s not just one door at front so that’s just the brand and the the the style i go with for the door porch door option what would the price point be for attempts that they’re probably quite high intense are they yeah so that’s a high end temp it’s about 400 euros but it lasts me probably eight or ten years and i camp constantly with it so for me it’s worth it it’s worth it exactly it’s worth the investment thanks a million michelle okay okay at the time that there’s loads of questions in the chat too but i’ll go through the q and a questions first does this this is from tom o’connor does michelle feel safe as a lone woman how long has she been hassled much on her travels so do i feel safe um yes i i feel safe i only camp if i do feel safe and somehow i’ve managed to wing it but um i suppose with you know with practice i i didn’t start out age 20 when i first started cycle touring camping here by the castle in ski that wasn’t the style of a place i ever went to so my first trip was on the danube and along the danube there’s so many cyclists and so many people camping i would have felt very safe there so you just built it up and then pushed the boundaries a little bit more but just the only tip i would say if you’re a solo female or even two females i always park my bicycle quite far away from my tent so that nobody if they’re coming by connects one bicycle with the tent so hopefully if somebody were to see this tent tonight they would maybe think there’s either a couple or maybe two lads or maybe allowed in the tent i may not go near it so i i always park the bike lock the bike quite far away so that nobody connects one one lone bicycle with the tent right excellent excellent tip thank you okay now going to the chat because it turns out there’s loads of questions in the chat and and i also i’m going to read the conversations about that john’s here saying um hello from sly go as well john who you’re talking about michelle and hoping to cycle to the channel myself this summer as soon as possible there’s some other links um somebody think oh this is it’s harder to find the questions now going down and i have a couple of questions from on the email as well and someone’s saying the great southern greenway has been terminated and improved as far as i’m actually the great ceiling greenway because we were down in limerick last weekend and we wanted to cycle at fresno it’s being tarmacked at the moment i think it’s um murray and you know have you heard what the about the great southern whether any any dates when it’s supposed to be completed or anything i haven’t if i’m totally honest no it says on the website and it says um late july did you know in ireland late july yeah so but anyway at the moment on the great southern um website it says the tarmac tarmacking has been done from from it’s in newcastle west to the next anyway it’s it’s the next section on it so not the rathkeel section it’s been terramax so it’s closed at the moment um and someone has put in a link to the lovely exhibition that louise and mentioned castlevania that’s in the chat as well um some of them say to someone about that’s all those questions of the tent again um and someone else agreeing that the small roads in ireland are right for returning to roads someone else saying that apparently the scones and google and barrow are the best scones in ireland my other food in that hotel is just it’s just incredible i only got to stay there for one night but it is fabulous but you’re writing a beautiful place okay now here’s here’s a here’s another question um can anyone speak chat about their experience on back roads with fast traffic and close passes excited to plan a holiday with the newbie cyclist but very concerned it might end up being more stressful than relaxed compared to cycling on the quiet cycle ways for example france looking at rustler to barry hacky or villa roots that’s the one you didn’t raise so yeah i did that i mean my experience of back roads in rural ireland is that generally speaking they’re kind of narrow so emotions coming around the corner has to be prepared for the fact that there’s another vehicle coming towards them so it really doesn’t matter whether the other vehicle is a bicycle or a car you know they have to be prepared they have to expect the unexpected i don’t i very seldom experience a problem on the back roads of roran ireland where you experience the problems are when you get onto things like the r roads where there’s a bit of traffic and white van man is in a hurry um and it’s not always white unknown fairness it’s um i think every everybody who works for a living who travels for a living seems to be in a hurry in times like a friday afternoon especially in the big counties like mayo and cork in dirty gold but on the back roads i don’t have a problem and i was away this weekend in roscommon and there was an awful lot of agricultural traffic and i found that the agricultural traffic has to move carefully and they always see you and they give you know they can’t always stop people you know they wait for you to stop and get in out of the way so i see somebody else said they’re in the chat and it’s a very good hint if you’re traveling with somebody less confident whether that’s a child or another adult and i did it recently i brought a friend um from temple ogden the daughter and threw dublin portland out to hope and she was quite nervous going through dublin port and i went slightly behind her and slightly out very much i also have a way of wiggling my ass i call it wiggling my ass which is i actually wobble deliberately wobble slightly when i hear a car coming and then i move in and cycle steadily but you know a little bit of a wobble um is good for making them take notice of you but definitely if you stay behind and slightly outside the nervous cyclist if anybody’s going to get hit you’re going to get hit if you’re a confident cyclist sure you shouldn’t get hit that’s nice up and forth on that issue i would just say as a person i don’t live in rural ireland anymore but i grew up there and i spent a month back there recently i would say that um roads near beaches no matter how an hour they are on sunny days avoid them um yeah no matter where you are in ireland unfortunately just it doesn’t even it’s busy when you’ve got those beautiful sunny days and beaches you get a lot of traffic and i think from personal experience there’s a there’s there’s sighted season there’s normally two cuts of silage one around late may early june and sometimes the seventh around late july and there can be a lot of tractors on the road and even though they are careful they’re coming in awful and that there’d be there’d be times i i would if i was in an area where there’s a lot of pasture a lot of silence been caught i wouldn’t aim to be on the roads at those times i don’t know michelle if you agree but tractors it’s not they do they do often travel there carefully but they’re just very big the wheels are taller and they just might not see it so that should be just not my just my rural experience not my cycling experience does anybody else have anything to add into that one be afraid i might just jump sorry go ahead louise no very briefly i guess my what what i would do in that situation is just don’t be afraid to go onto a minor minor road or go down a little lane and go exploring if you are in a kind of yeah exactly those in between roads where there is a bit of traffic and there’s enough space to speed and you know a lot of there is a lot of speeding i just found i really um really enjoyed the back roads and getting into the back of the back roads and eventually they do lead you somewhere so maybe just kind of indulge in that sort of sensor exploration rather than feeling that you have to stick to the map or what google maps and that would be my kind of uh tip but there’s no perfect solution to it unfortunately you know we are vulnerable um at times michelle you want to say something yeah i was just going to say um like i’ve cycled in kind of random countries like i remember cycling into los angeles or cycling into mexico city like huge big population cities where traffic is just bunkers which it means when you come back to ireland all the traffic just seems wonderful for recycling but one thing one tip i did pick up from abroad i’ve never quite seen it in ireland is is some people who are a bit nervous often girls actually that i’ve met they swim with this they cycle with a swim noodle um across the back of their bike so they attach it wide ways on there onto their carrier it just makes the back of them colorful and very wide so and i’ve seen swim noodles with things stuck onto them onto the edges you know maybe hide this jacket if you’re feeling very nervous so it’s just a solution and some people have felt more confident with something like that great too and just another tiny thing which um i mean i totally agree with everything else but another thing is just to really try not to be intimidated every right to be on the road don’t cycle into the ditch there’s no you’ve no business to be in the ditch you know take two feet cycle it keep straight be predictable you’re on the road they’re on the road let them wait till there’s a time and and i know sometimes you there’s a sense oh my god somebody’s behind me i need to pipe into the ditch don’t skip straight keep on your course and let them go around you that’s it i say absolutely okay the next question is from claudia um again and do you require a permit to camp anywhere in ireland i think this is again michelle you michelle and i actually any of you i think this is a bit of a gray area in ireland isn’t this personally if i’m going to camp on somebody’s land i i will always try and ask if it’s kind of manageable and and then you always just you often you know there’s a bonus then to that question where often in ireland you’ll be brought out of a monkey tea or a you know a sandwich and and told oh make sure you visit for example the museum of country life down the road it’s wonderful so if you if you ask you’ll often get a positive response and then you’ll often get a more positive response in terms of a little bit of local info which is nice the other thing is there is there is a situation where you need where you need permits and that’s in some of the national parks i think um you’re supposed to get a permit i think it might be oh you can look it up on their websites you know if you’re more than a certain number of people or something like that um but that’s the only place i know where you need a permit otherwise you need you know you should as michelle says look for permission from the landowner have a bit of cup on you can camp on a beach or up a mountain but you can’t camp in somebody’s field of corn yeah very good yeah my father brought us on camping holidays and didn’t believe in campsites so many is the mug of tea and the chat with with farmers with heads during our childhood much to our other mortification of course but you know that’s what fathers do to their children um great presentation thank you for your efforts very inspiring that’s it inspiring i’ve found all these talks on you’re all freedom loving women i love it you’re all i actually know i i love it it’s just there’s no i i i again i’m not i don’t have the words for it but the feeling of enthusiasm and love of freedom and yeah and does anyone have any thoughts or experience with cycling with small children is this due but that that was already covered really by the uh but again i said greenways are a great way to start does anyone know here we go um marie do you probably have the most information of this the iron rod aaron does anyone know if erin rodriguez has any plans to increase price capacity on trains i had a problem on trains either someone without a booking had taken the bike space someone without a booking tried to squash their bike into the full rack this isn’t good for anyone’s bike so if any and the as far as i know the new rolling stock will have more bicycle capacity there was also a resolution passed by the european parliament that bikes any any rolling capacity built after a certain date should have a minimum carrying capacity for bikes i don’t i can’t recall the details but there you know things will be improving over the next few years um and that’s you know that’s as it is and there is a problem with the booking system um oh um really now let me be a nerd and when you book bikes on the train most trains have four carriages and within the within the each sequence of four carriages there is space for two bikes now you can sometimes get an extra bike in if you’re if you’re with friends and you know what you’re doing yeah um a lot of trains actually have two or three sets of four carriages they can they have eight or twelve carriages and each one of those four carriages has two more spaces but the booking system can only take two can only take two bikes so you know i i had the experience of going to modern gara and myself and i i bought two bikes on the train and that was grand so we took the two spaces and these other fellas turned up we were all gone cycling on the greenway for the day and these other fellas turned up and there’s nothing booked and they nearly died when they saw us with their and realized we had a reservation but then they discovered that the other the further down the train there was more spaces so it’s very it’s very disorganized but it’s really a question of trying to book your bike on and if you don’t succeed in booking you can take your chances and very often it works out but not if there’s a big crowd it’s a problem so we just keep on trying to put on pressure to get more capacity yeah and to get israel to make their system more user-friendly but i was reading a blog about um the uk it’s actually better than the uk because trying to get an icon or train in the uk involves you have to ring the individual provider and arrange and it’s a different system for every provider yeah you can also i didn’t mention you can also bring your bike on buses and on both air and it’s expensive because they charge you 12 euro no matter what distance you go um but the private bus operators will generally take a bike we’ll take bikes and one charge for them can i say something um about taking so i had to take my bike on a bus to prairie actually and i had an electric bike and it’s a real heft actually to get it onto the bus because you have to lift it up into the kind of the carriage or not into the carriage into the under the compartment and um it’s actually very awkward um i think as a woman i don’t you know i don’t feel insecure or unsafe when i travel but there are just certain key things where i don’t have particularly good upper body strength so that’s the thing that actually and there’s incredibly kind passenger who just jumped off and immediately helped me yeah i’ve done it myself but it was an awful kind it was really awkward and the the same i think you can have the same problem with getting an electric bike in particular because they really are quite heavy it is a problem with electric bikes even putting them on to a bike rack on a car um and it’s a problem for women we don’t have the upper body strength yeah um for an ordinary bike you can lift it onto a bus okay the front of the bus and in the us as well you know the way like there’s city buses you can put they have a rack on the front which i think is just such good design uh i don’t know why we don’t talk to you okay i’ve got four questions that were emailed in they’re quite detailed so i’ll ask them one time i’m just conscious it’s gone past nine o’clock now so we’ll only stay on for five more minutes so the first question is how do you navigate we’re constantly stopping to check google maps or our smartphone books or websites um with recommended routes i think murray you mentioned those we come back to those how to maximize safety in country roads that’s been we’ve talked about already and is what is wild camping on a long cycle too much i think michelle’s kind of covered there so the two mate the two main one would be how do you navigate without constantly stopping to check google maps on your smartphone and the second one could someone recommend some books or websites because you got cut off short when you were doing that marie earlier so who wants to take do you want who wants to take the first one i thought that would be like i um i might be able to show you a knick-knack i have that is very good for navigating but i’ve put a whole lot of links into the into the chat chat um which are you know cover thing cover things that i covered the links to things i talked about um is everybody able to save the chat or just the panelists can anyone who’s attending uh attending say you’re the only there’s three buttons i have three buttons here if i hit it it says save chat and then i can save all the links and all the informal is everyone who i think everyone in the meeting can do that there’s three buttons down at the bottom of the chat if you hit those save chat and it means all the information in this chat will be saved on a following your computer and you can improve browse it later i’m not sure if that’s open to everyone i think it is you can certainly copy bits of chat yeah exactly yeah exactly i’m not certain if all attendees can save the chat but i’ll be saving the chat anyway so if there’s anything somebody missed uh they can always contact us and we can um we can send it on but yeah you can copy and paste bits out of it yourself yeah because it might have been either it the navigation issue that is a real one but some of us like to stop occasionally especially have our fisher have our fisher um have our official companions stop location and look at maps i have this little knick-knack there’s a holder now it’s not it’s not cheap i think i paid about 22 pounds starting for it and i don’t know how you get stuff from the uk these days but there are other versions of it available um you can there’s a holder for it that you put on the handlebar of the bike you click it into the holder and you slide the map into it and you have it sitting up in front of you you can also use use michelle’s shoulder her bar bag there most of our bags will have a kind of a plastic cover under which you can slide them up and if you put them up there then you can lean forward easily and have a look at it so that’s two ways of dealing with it there’s also um now i’m not i’m not a fan of when i say i’m not a fan of google maps um i can’t read a mobile phone bright sunlight sorry um so i don’t do i do google maps of course i do google maps but um i can’t read them easily in bright sunlight um i won’t put my phone on the handlebars because irish weather is just too depressing and knowing me the phone is going to pop off and break anyway so the other thing is you can get a map case which you can buy in outdoor shops it’s a waterproof thing and you put it it goes in a string around your neck and you kind of have it hanging out here in front of you and you can look at it easily now you have to stop you can’t i think the directions for this yoke tell you not to be reading them up while you’re cycling but you’re you know and if you’re like me and you have to put on sunglasses and take off the sunglasses and put on the reading glasses you’re really in trouble but certainly you know some kind of a map case in front of you is the way is the way to go and if you really want to use google maps you can get holders and garments and you know you can turn google maps onto directions yeah so the other thing about a map is a map can’t lose battery so yeah it’s probably always a good idea really if you’re especially if you’re going to do any kind of um exploring and haven’t have having a map being able to read it kind of won’t leave won’t leave you stuck this was always a local you can adore you can knock on but still thanks a millionaire and then i think the other question was i’m going to go unfortunately i look i talk all night and you know so we will move this chat to the zoom drinks now in a minute just to fill up the meeting the last question was there any and marion rates are there any particular websites or books any any of you would recommend um i’ve put up a list of websites that are you know to look up per maps i’m now going to drop a few books some of which are a bit old and esoteric which are have a look at them right um and i think i put something on the link to the live to the irish libraries the i think i put in on the irish libraries i’ve put in the um the catalog number for ireland and if you go to that shelf you’ll find a few odd books about cycling yeah and again the maps that you showed merida were great they’d be ones that we would use and in terms of i would just go to you know every i mean google is an amazing thing and we don’t really recommend books so much we send all links to like you know um you know all that is different little local communities like the country life you know that has a great website so you know there’s an absolute fund of information on on google we used to recommend we first started tours we used to direct everybody to kenny’s bookshop and go away and say just go to kenny’s bookshop online and you’re sorted and and still do that definitely but i mean there’s there’s a myriad of stuff if you go into the local towns that they’ll have a ton of information excellent yeah okay like i said we could talk all night and we will but we’ll start we’ll so we’ll just we’ll wrap up the official part of the meeting now thank you very much to marie gaskin of irish cyclists fairies louise williams um of cyclists and activists um michelle hardiman and um maria and raidford’s side thank you very much for coming along tonight it’s been i think and it’s it’s like i don’t inspirational overused i think this was a genuinely inspirational um set of presentations they’re just it was beautiful and freedom uh again i’m no good at expressing but genuinely inspirational thank you all for coming along and we’re not sure if we’re going to have a meeting next month we generally take august off we might you might see as we work very hard at the public meetings this year we might take july off as well but watch dublin cycling campaign our website and facebook page and twitter and stuff and if we are having a meeting it’ll be around this time next month and we’ll let you know and we’ll promise we’ll come up with some interesting topic and if not we’ll see you all in september so thank you very much for joining us and we’ll finish off recording now and what we’ll do is
1 Comment
Really enjoyed this video, some great ideas for cycling in Ireland. Any chance you could add the links from the chat in here? It would be a handy reference point.