warthog1 wrote:il padrone wrote: Bendigo for a bigger city with great cycling.
Can confirm that. Bunch rides any day of the week.
Sometimes with Aussie and international champions.
Good quiet roads with fast flat sections, rolling hills and climbs. Velodrome, vets and cycling Aust clubs.
I'd echo all that... but for Ballarat.
I wasn't going to post, because in these threads everybody just says "where I live" (or "the brand I ride" or "the operating system I use" or "the church my family goes to"), and in perspective, Ballarat misses out a bit on truly epic climbs - although I can roll out my front gate (at ~460m elevation) and be up one of our two 750m mountains after 13km of near continuous climbing [1], most of which is on quiet rural roads. And that's something we have in spades - quiet rural roads. Forest or farmland, with or without hills, as you prefer. When I duck out for a quick road ride, I'm out of town within a few km.
Road, track and MTB racing (short-course) every week in summer and at least once a month throughout the year, multiple bunch rides every day of the week [2], endless (and quietly increasing) singletrack to get lost in. And big national/international grade road racing to watch a couple of times a year (Buninyong is almost an outer suburb of Ballarat).
I've lived in Sydney, Melbourne and Ballarat... and there's really no comparison. Ballarat's the pick for cycling. To be honest, I reckon any smaller city would be a big improvement over a capital city.
tim
[1] I present as exhibit A, one night after the kids were in bed:
That's gotta be better than sitting on the couch watching TV
[2] I once thought I'd been stood up by an acquaintance who talked me into coming along on a bunch ride on a Saturday morning, until half way around I figured out that I'd joined the wrong bunch... rolling out at the same time from a _different_ corner on the same street. Easy mistake to make.