ABOUT

Adventure Cycling Victoria was started in 2016 by Peter Foot (that’s me, right), a bike industry employee and dad of two young kids. 

It began humbly, with only a few ride guides. It is now the most comprehensive source of information on adventure cycling routes in Victoria, and receives thousands of visitors every month. 

So what motivated me to create Adventure Cycling Victoria?  

I’ve always loved the outdoors. I’ve always loved getting out of the city and exploring. When I was a kid I did a lot of hiking, but as I became an adult a bike became the best way for me to see the country. 

I could go further, and see more, but still at a pace that felt immersive. I could wheel my bike onto a train and within a few hours be in any corner of the state. I could ride basically anywhere, camp where I wanted, and all without the hassle and expense of owning a car. Bombing down a gravel road at 50kph was also a little more enlivening than putting one foot in front of the other, which tickled me in the right way. It was cheap and convenient and perfect. 

So this is what I did, whenever I had some spare time. I would just look up some roads or trails that seemed interesting and go and ride them. And I consistently had amazing experiences. I rode fantastic roads in beautiful places, and I hardly ever came across other cyclists. I wondered why more people weren’t doing the same. 

One day I came up with the idea of sharing these experiences online, and making it easier for others to go on their own adventures. I had a vision of taking adventure cycling from a niche activity to something common and unremarkable. I wanted to popularise it.   

At first I thought about making it into a business, and trying to make it something that I did full time, but for various reasons this didn’t work out. So it’s been a side thing that I have done while working in the bike industry.  

Sometimes visitors to this site imagine that there is an office and a team and so forth. It’s just me, mostly working in the early morning before work and while the kids are still in bed, and with the help of a handful of guest contributors (thank you a million times!), and now a wonderful volunteer who helps with some site maintenance. 

This whole arrangement has had some upsides. Being in the industry for many years has given me a broad and deep understanding of bikes and the people who ride them (or want to ride them). This means I have a lot more knowledge I can share, and can help people take up adventure cycling even more effectively. And the fact that I don’t charge people for using the site has probably encouraged those contributors and volunteers to come forward.   

You’ll notice that there are a few ways that you can contribute financially to this enterprise. There is an ebook you can buy (which I reckon is a pretty awesome book, by the way). You can become a patron by making a monthly donation (thank you to the angels who do this), or I’m now rolling out a facility that will allow you to make a one off donation (which you can find on individual ride pages), which I ask people to do if they use the info on this site to plan their own bike ride, and of course if they can afford it. I also occasionally get paid to promote a product or event, which I do only if I’m confident of its value. 

In my twenties I had the privilege of plenty of spare time to put into ACV without having to worry too much about the financial reward. Now, in December 2022, I’m 32 and I have a wife, a 2-year-old child and a 1-month old baby. I absolutely adore this life. I’m so lucky to have my wonderful family, but spare time is hard to come by now. Add in the rapidly rising cost of living, and the time I spend building and maintaining this website has got to pay, at least to some degree.

I can assure you that at the moment, the money I do get through ACV is nowhere near a replacement wage. It’s enough to cover the costs of running the site, plus just enough to encourage me to keep plugging away at it in between other things. So if you do make a contribution, know that I’m extremely grateful and that it goes a long way to keeping things going.   

If it does ever get to somewhere approximating a wage, one of the first things I want to do is offer payment for guest contributions, so if I ever announce that, you know things are going well. It’s also worth mentioning that in these years when my kids are young, my work on ACV will inevitably take more of a back seat, but that won’t be forever.  

There are plenty of plans and ideas in the back of my head about how to improve and develop the site, as well as ways to create an in-person community. I see myself being in it for the long haul, and I’m excited about where things could go in future.  

And I’m in it for the long haul because over time, and particularly recently, I’ve begun to appreciate the value ACV contributes beyond just ‘getting people on their bikes.’ It's taken on a deeper meaning for me. I believe it contributes, in its own small way, to creating the kind of future I want to live in. 

Our society and culture is afflicted by overlapping social, environmental and economic crises. More and more people are becoming alienated, from society, from each other, from the natural world. Rates of depression and anxiety are high and climbing. There are widespread feelings of loneliness and lack of meaning.  

Things become bigger, faster, more mechanised, more automated, more mass produced, more comfortable and more convenient. They also become less personal, less private and less human. We are more ‘connected’–to the information grid, the electricity grid, the traffic grid–but less connected to each other, and less connected to nature. 

The artifice we have built shields us from the ‘real’ world. The world where we come face to face with other humans, with animals, plants and critters. Where you are exposed to the dirt, the heat and the rain. Where things are unpredictable and wild, where you must adapt and use your instinct. We need these experiences to keep us psychologically grounded. 

Adventure cycling brings us into the real world of living things. It unplugs us from the grid. It can remind us of what's important, and what's not. It can build up our courage and capability, and restore our sanity. If we are to find our way back to ourselves, we will need capable, courageous and sane people.

When cycling you travel slowly. You see and smell and hear all the little things you would have sped past in a car on your way to your next ‘destination.’ You contribute to local economies. You strike up conversations with people outside of your ‘bubble’, people you would never have met otherwise. No man is an island, from other humans, or from nature. We must maintain these connections if we are to retain our humanity. In a culture that's flapping in the wind, these experiences can ground us.

As I grow older I feel more and more that the real remedies are in the small scale, the personal, the local. They come from the ground up. They start with citizens living out their values and creating new ways of relating and sustaining. It comes from building the new world within the shell of the old. This is a small contribution I can make to building that new world.