Party time in Dundrum – our longest cargo bike journey!
The cargo bike is great for local journeys. Since moving to Bray, we are much further away from our kids school & retail locations such as in Dundrum. I decided to take the longest single trip on the cargo bike, 18km to get from Bray to Dundrum for one of our kids’ friend’s birthday party which was taking place in Funky Monkeys in the Dundrum shopping centre.
The Route
To drive this particular route from south Bray to the Dundrum Centre takes approximately 20 minutes on a good day. Using a bicycle we do not have the luxury of using the motorway so I needed to go through Bray town, up the N11 dual carriageway, crossed through the Sandyford Industrial zone & zipped through a housing estate to take us to Dundrum.
The route itself is 18km (one way) so it was the longest journey I have undertaken to date on the cargo bike. It took approximately 1¼ hours to complete.
The journey itself was a mix of on-road & off-road cycle lanes. Anyone familiar with Irish cycling infrastructure. The journey from Bray town to an extremely busy junction at Loughlinstown is broadly a poor quality on-road painted cycle lane. At Loughlinstown I needed to get the cargo bike across the N11 via a pedestrian/cycle bridge as it was too dangerous to cross via the roundabout which is the entry/exit point of the M11 motorway.
The N11 from Loughlinstown up to the Newtownpark Avenue junction is an off-road cycle lane which is OK but would not win any awards especially when trying to cross junctions shared with fast moving cars.
On the way home
For the kids the most interesting feature along the entire 18km journey is seeing the Luas trams at the Luas depot in Sandyford!
The kids had a great time at the birthday party in Funky Monkeys which is a play centre where little people can run riot! Needless to say they were tired coming out & with a 1¼ hour journey home ahead of us, both kids at one point or another took some time to go to sleep.
Admittedly, it was a bit of a long journey for driver & kids but I was glad I had given it a try to see how we all survived. It is not an atypical journey we would undertake regularly so it is good to experiment every once in a while.
