Journey to Adventure

Here at the Wel­ling­tonista we are gen­er­ally in favour of the bicycle as a styl­ish and use­ful means of trans­port­a­tion. It’s true we don’t all cycle, but as pro­ponents of liv­able urb­an spaces we can all appre­ci­ate that one less car trip is a good car trip.

Along those lines, Cyc­ling Wel­ling­ton is a great loc­al site that gently lets you know that you don’t have to be some lycra-clad loon to take to the streets on two wheels – just be you, the Cyc­lo­pol­it­an.

Anoth­er great site pro­duced loc­ally is Inspir­ing Rid­ing, which focusses more on the adven­ture oppor­tun­it­ies that can arise from bike own­er­ship. It’s these aspects of rid­ing my own bike that get me the most enthused: I love get­ting out onto the trails around Wel­ling­ton’s hills and feel­ing like I’m a very long way from the city.

Inspir­ing Rid­ing shows that adven­ture can be where you find it: not just three days on the Dun­stan Trail but also tak­ing your kids rid­ing at Karori Park.

This is pretty much in line with my think­ing on the sub­ject. An epic adven­ture for me would be rid­ing from my home in the west­ern hill sub­urbs down to town and around the bays and back home again on a sunny day.

So I was very excited to learn that the people behind Inspir­ing Rid­ing are plan­ning to launch Jour­ney, a quarterly magazine about access­ible bicycle adven­tures:

Jour­ney launches in Feb­ru­ary 2013. It will be filled with beau­ti­ful, evoc­at­ive images and pas­sion­ate, involving writ­ing. It will be prin­ted on thick, recycled, uncoated paper. It will have no advert­ising inter­rupt­ing the edit­or­i­al flow. We hope it will be a journ­al that becomes lov­ingly tattered and worn from repeat view­ings – repeated searches for adven­ture inspir­a­tion.

I really like this concept. So I got in con­tact with Paul Smith, one of Jour­ney’s three instig­at­ors (along with Mike Wilson and Beth Smith), to ask him what made him want to cre­ate Jour­ney.

Paul Smith:

Jour­ney has been gen­er­ated from a simple desire – to see more people on bicycles dis­cov­er­ing adven­ture. It’s a com­bin­a­tion of two things that I am totally pas­sion­ate about – bikes and adven­ture. We want people to exper­i­ence even just a small part of the buzz and life-affirm­ing feel­ing of a bicycle adven­ture.

Me: How did you come to be cre­at­ing a magazine?

Through a long and wind­ing trail. I grew up in Eng­land, became a pro­fes­sion­al engin­eer, spent a dec­ade work­ing for auto­mot­ive com­pan­ies, then got tired of UK life and moved to NZ with Beth almost a dec­ade ago. Beth and I re-eval­u­ated our pri­or­it­ies in life – decided we wer­en’t happy with ‘careers’, vowed to spend our time doing things we were pas­sion­ate about, and manip­u­lated life to work for us on our terms. And here we are – Inspir­ing Rid­ing and Jour­ney. For the first time in many many years I feel like I’m doing what I’m meant to be doing.

But what made you decide to start a magazine?

We nev­er star­ted out want­ing to pro­duce a magazine. We still don’t see Jour­ney as a magazine (des­pite it look­ing, feel­ing and smelling rather like one). I star­ted writ­ing art­icles for cyc­ling and adven­ture magazines, Mike star­ted sup­ply­ing pho­tos, and we both got a bit dis­il­lu­sioned with hav­ing no con­trol over the way our stor­ies were pub­lished. Hence – Jour­ney got touted as an out­let for our work. It became the tool to inspire oth­ers. We wanted to print it on lovely paper and make it some­thing to cher­ish – just because thats how we think pub­lic­a­tions should be. And it has grown from there.

Paul’s plans don’t stop at cre­at­ing the magazine, how­ever – he and his co-cre­at­ors want to fur­ther enable and empower would-be bicycle adven­tur­ers:

If Jour­ney planted the seed, we needed some­thing to make it grow. That is the web­site we are also launch­ing – the ‘enable’ part of this. It will sup­port Jour­ney with the back­ground info for the adven­tures, how-to art­icles, more stor­ies of adven­ture, equip­ment to make adven­ture a little less risky, and links to resources and everything needed to make your own plans. It is the stuff that removes the bar­ri­ers – the per­ceived reas­ons why adven­ture is too hard or too risky.

And finally – the empower­ment. It is all well and good us telling people how lovely it is to ride a bike and do some­thing dif­fer­ent. But hear­ing that from oth­er ‘nor­mal’ people is far more power­ful. So we want to cre­ate a net­work of ‘bicycle adven­tur­ers’ – and we want them to tell their stor­ies, con­trib­ute to Jour­ney and the web­site, join us in our social net­work for­um, and sup­port oth­ers just like them who just need a gentle shove or a little reas­sur­ance. We’ll help out too by run­ning a few ‘loosely organ­ised rides’ and invite people to come and try a ride through the night, or par­ti­cip­ate in a team 24 hour race, or go on an overnight trip (for example).

But in order to get this awe­some-sound­ing (and awe­some look­ing, from the mockups) magazine and web­site out there, Paul, Mike and Beth need our help. They’ve cre­ated a page on crowd-fund­ing site Poz­ib­le in order to raise money to get the first issue prin­ted:

They need to raise $7,500 by the middle of Decem­ber. All sup­port is wel­come, but $20 gets you a copy of the first magazine delivered to your door, with a series of oth­er rewards as your pledge amount increases.

I really want to see this magazine, on old-fash­ioned and tact­ile paper. So I’ve pledged. Maybe you should too.

And yes. What the hell. Maybe I will just ride out to Scorch­ing Bay for an ice-cream.