Kirstie Pelling

Kirstie Pelling began her career as a Promotions Director for BBC Creative Services, where she worked as a writer and journalist, producing features for a wide range of newspapers and magazines.

Following a honeymoon gap year adventue cycling 6000 kilometres in South America, she started her website The Family Adventure Project with her husband. Kirstie was awarded the British Guild of Travel Writers' Travel Blogger of the Year Award in 2016, 2018 and 2019 for her colourful account of their long-distance cycling adventures around the world. These included biking end to end of New Zealand with two toddlers in trailers, cycling across the Baltic countries on a tandem and a triplet with tweens, and interrailing from home to Istanbul with three teenagers and five folding bikes.

Moving to Cumbria she became a columnist for Cumbria Life Magazine and co-wrote Heft Like the Herdwick for BBC Radio Four. She has been Poet in Residence for Cumbria Tourism's Go Lakes Travel and Lonely Planet Kids and was once captured by BBC television wandering the fells dressed as Wordsworth's lonely cloud. Her kids have begged her never to do anything like that again.