This gallery contains 12 photos.
The joys of the bike rides we have at our ECF meetings are their multi-national flavour and a chance to explore a new country. This year our excellent AGM hosts from Cyclists.ie had organised three completely different day rides to … Continue reading
Stepping outside my hotel at the ECF AGM in Dublin I cannot help but smile.
Aren’t cute pets what the internet was invented for?
And just nearby the Dublin bikes are waiting for action in front of the historic Christchurch on a lovely spring morning.
It’s going to be a good day.
The promise – promotion for National Bike Week in Dublin
I feel really sorry for my hosts for the last few days.
To be fair they did put on an excellent cycling conference. But to invite an international cycling group to your city and have every possible weather cliché come true is really sad, there is really no reason why a storm should wreck everything in June.
To give it some science. Those outside northern Europe may not know that the Atlantic Jetstream is bringing storms across the Atlantic hundreds of kilometres further south than is normal at this time of year which brings record rainfall since April.
And global warming means these storms are wetter and windier than we really should expect. When I got back to the UK last night the country was covered in flood warnings and Brussels has been awful for weeks too.
So sadly the Dublin cycling tour to look at what the city has done on cycling just became a mess, unprepared riders in difficult gloomy conditions. By the time we set off to ride to the conference on Friday I had every sympathy with people from Slovenia or Romania who had run out of dry clothes.
So this trip’s photo record reflects the experience. All I can promise is that I will go back.
“Do not despair” message of the day?
Despite the rain being on a bike was just so much better than being in the congested car traffic. And credit to the hardy Dublin cyclists who replicated Copenhagen’s Green Wave – but as a small wave of high viz bowling in to town.
I hope Vancouver gives me some respite next week. And as a Brit I really hope the weather doesn’t do to the Olympics what it just did to Dublin Cycling Campaign. Fingers crossed.
Any port in a storm
Plan B – the only viable alternative
With just a week to go until I leave with the rest of the ECF team to attend Velo-city Global 2012 in Vancouver it has just hit me what amazing four weeks I have coming up.
This week it is off to Dublin for the Dublin Cycling Campaign conference which is focussing on participation and equality, especially cycling for women. Muireann O’Dea, Dublin Cycling Campaign’s new Chairperson talks about it here.
The day before the conference I am running a workshop in Dublin with the participants in VOCA The “Volunteers of Cycling” Academy (VOCA) Project. The two year project brings together small cycling advocacy groups from 11 European cities. Dublin, Seville (Spain), Nicosia (Cyprus), Vienna (Austria), Copenhagen (Denmark), Maribor (Slovenia), Prague (Czech Republic), Budapest (Hungary), Warsaw (Poland), Lisbon (Portugal) and Bucharest (Romania).
They are the great group I met on tour in Austria and I’ll be working with them to look at how we can improve the up and coming cyclists groups across Europe. Excitingly I’m running the same workshop in Vancouver where I’ll be joined by Jeff Miller from the Alliance for Bicycling and Walking who do amazing stuff with community cycling groups all across the US.
After the conference I’m spending about two weeks in British Columbia. Couple of days around Vancouver and the “lads” of ECF will meet to watch the European Cup Final (soccer to US and Canadian followers). Then off to Whistler – just booked two days guided mountain bke riding on the legendary trails. Three days touring across the mountains, then staying with an old school friend for a week before I have to get back to the UK to see Bruce Springsteen in Hyde Park, London, my wife’s Christmas present.
No idea how all that is going to hang together, not least because the cycle tour in Canada depends on me buying a recycled bike in Vancouver!
But to make it all come to life I have gone over to the dark side, star man Julian at ECF got me fired up to the potential for twitter. So now you can hopefully follow the tour by tweet too, although I feel like a bit of a numpty at the moment. @maynekevin for what its worth.
I Do Not Despair 