This project shares stories from my cycling adventures. It is an urban adventure around my neighbourhood, my city and also includes my travels to other places. I invite you to share your stories too.

My experiment to ride my bike for four seasons in everyday life has made it through its first season – summer!

As you’d expect, some of my adventures over the summer involved meeting the weather like “Riding in the Rain”, “To Ride or not to Ride” and discovering the “Summer essentials” of shade, watermelon and how resilience is part of that picture, particularly as we live with climates changing.

Other stories share my encounters with interesting people like “Lord of the Rules” which involves a grumpy old guy and a red rose. There are many random meetings with unexpected happiness as I ride around. I’ve heard stories from many people about their connection with bicycle riding – current or past – and so I’ve opened a page for you to post your stories, thoughts, and experiences with bike-riding.

Decisions were a definite feature in the first season of this experiment. Am I a fair weather rider? Where do I do Christmas shopping? To ride or not to ride? Some of my choices have changed as a result of this project. Some readers have said they’ve made different choices too. It makes me wonder if others have as well.

Along the way, I’ve kept some statistics and the summer wrap-up can report a total of 990kms recorded over the thirteen weeks of summer (although that doesn’t include my cycling on Lord Howe Island which I couldn’t record).

A guest post from James’ travels gave a visitor’s insight into “Bicycle culture in The Netherlands”. Plus there have been stories from my travels. “Cycling in Paradise” is a story of our week on Lord Howe Island and “Where the Great Barrier Reef begins” is about a visit to Bargara. There’ll be posts about our travels to Denmark and Norway in the coming months.

There was a bicycle maintenance workshop where I found a timely tack in my tyre as well as a wonderful fringe festival called Pedal Brisbane inspiring people to cycle more in everyday life. And of course, one of this season’s highlights is “Replacing Kylie” as honorary patron of the Cyber Riders Club!

It’s been a full summer of active travel adventures. When the experiment started on the first day of December, the first day of summer, I didn’t know where this idea was going to lead. I still don’t. And that’s kind of what makes it interesting, makes it enjoyable and makes me keen to adventure some more.

Summer is over and Autumn awaits!