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.