This route is one as a group we've all wanted to do for a long time. The West Coast of Ireland has this enamaring mystery around it. With all my friends who've visited can't seem to say enough good things about the beauty of Ireland and the craic of the people who live there.
As always with these trips, they come around so quickly, loads of the research and planning got left to the last minute.
In the early planning phase, we decided we weren't going to camp on this trip. It would require a lot more planning and we felt we wouldn't be enjoying Ireland in the same way i.e. it would be much harder to go to pubs all night and head back to our camping spot as a group of 5. We also had some huge back to back days planned, where a bad nights sleep could completely kill the vibe. We also really like showers at the end of a long day of riding. Shoot me!
The total route covered roughly 800km+ over the course of the 10 days we'd planned, including travel days (of which there were a few!). Turns out getting to Ireland from Manchester by bike takes a bit of thinking about when you've got a group of 5. We had issues with booking bike spots on trains and ferries. For some reason, they both seemed to have limits of 4 people max. We didn't want to risk turning up and hoping they'd let us on as if they didn't, this would mean missing out on a connecting journey.
Instead we opted to stay overnight in Holyhead, all 5 of us making our own way to the airbnb on Thursday evening. Deciding that waking up and cycling to ferry from our airbnb would be the easiest way to gurantee we all make it to the ferry on time.
Route
- Roughly follows a mix of the Wild Atlantic Way (WAW), Eurovelo 1 and MizMal routes.
- We had 7 days of cycling with 3 days of travelling. This was all the time we could get off work.
Packing
- Bag breakdown
- Regrets, should have broughts
- Best brings
Highlights
- Ferrys, the 3 we had. In order of fun.
- Staying in airbnbs having showers
- Pubs in every town
- Weather getting better but when it was bad it was fun still
- Mayo v Kerry in the county Ireland cup
- Enjoying the context
Regrets
- Weather being amazing for the previous 2 weeks to us arriving only to rain for 4 days on our arrival
- Not having done longer
- Going to Achill Island/Sound and more of the north west when we had good weather