Dublin to Achill - Cycle

RoNo1984

Hi to all,

Im brand new to this forum and was wondering if anyone can throw a few tips my way.

A bunch of my friends and I are planning a charity cycle from Dublin to achill - (290km) over 4 days, the group will range from experienced to not so experienced.

Does anyone have any experience on this route? Or is there even a route?
Any websites or tips on planning a bike trip across Ireland?
Are we mad?

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated

Esroh

Is that Dublin -Achill -Dublin in 4 days or just 1 way.With the motorway take the old roads.Find your own way to Maynooth(I'm aCulchie and Proud)Then Kilcock ,Enfield,Kinnegad,Kilbeggan,Moate,Athlone.Then head for Mountbellew, Tuam,Ballinrobe ,Westport,Newport and Achill.

blorg

I have had good luck in the past using Google Maps' "walking" directions, which tend to keep to back roads- have done Dublin-Galway, Dublin-Waterford and Dublin-Cork with routes initially planned this way. A GPS is very handy for these sort of routes as you can't rely on signposts on the back roads and stopping to look at maps at every junction would be annoying (I use a Garmin 705.)

RoNo1984

We're planning to do it from Dublin to Achill then get a lift back so just 4 days down stopping along the way. Plan on ending up in beautiful Keem beach.

Thanks for the website and for the route tips - couldn't find anything like that on-line, I've heard that some of the back roads are a bit dodgy - What kind of bike would you suggest for the roads?

Currently riding a racer/road bike - but thinking i'd definitly need to upgrade to a Hybrid?

biker_joe

great site to use, mapmyride.com, you need premium membership to print maps, but it's much better than google maps. it will also show the elevation to.

Biker Joe

petethedrummer

Road bike will be fine, better than a hybrid imo. Only thing is, if the others are on mountain bikes they will be lagging behind.

I cycled across Denmark on a road bike with panniers. Even through some forest and field sections and I didn't get a puncture till the last day. Next holiday I'll put bigger tyres (700x28C's) on the road bike, just for the peace of mind.

blorg

I've done most of my long distance cycling on a road bike with narrow (700x23c) tyres and that has been fine on the back roads. Better than a hybrid I reckon for the longer distances, you have a better range of hand positions. Do you need to carry luggage- in which case you might want to add a rack and panniers. I use a tourer for most multi-day stuff which has a rack and slightly wider tyres (700x25c.)

Regarding Google Maps, the "walking" directions are really pretty good if you want to plot a route avoiding main roads. Mapmyride is ultimately powered by Google Maps but will only route much shorter distances (50km max I think.) GMaps is also easier to tweak the route, you just drag it where you want it to go. So for inital planning, I would go with GMaps.

What GMaps doesn't have out of the box (although there are a few hacks) is the ease of downloading the route into a GPS, elevation, etc. so you could then manually copy this into Mapmyride when you are happy with it. The elevation feature is nice although I think you should be pretty flat out to Achill.

I then tend to copy it into Garmin Mapsource and finish up the route from there before transferring to the GPS. TBH I generally find the Google Maps walking routes better than Mapsource and so take them as the baseline and recreate in the latter manually using waypoints.

That route it suggested above (from GMaps) looks like a good one, pretty direct and avoids N roads for the most part. I have only cycled it as far as Summerhill but it is certainly pleasant that far. I would tweak it so you head out through the park rather than the N3 though.