Back in the mid-1980s, I did something that members of my local cycling club found hilarious – I cycled to the Sahara Desert and back.

In their Lycra shorts and replica Peugeot and La Vie Claire racing jerseys, they laughed at my bike which, laden with panniers, tent, cooking stove, sleeping bag, spare tyres and even a small folding deckchair, had been transformed from a sleek blade of steel to something resembling the aftermath of a gas explosion.

My humiliation continued in the remotest parts of Tunisia and Algeria where groups of children would greet my arrival at their villages by throwing lumps of rock at my head.

It seems I may have been ahead of my time – cycle touring is now considered cool. Even hard-core roadies are swapping their carbon racing machines for heavier steel touring bikes. And once off the beaten track, they are more likely to be greeted with email addresses and Facebook requests rather than a hail of stones.

According to Laura Moss, the organiser of the UK’s first cycle touring festival, we are seeing a renaissance in an activity that was previously once the domain of only the foolish or brave. She acknowledges that solo adventurers like Dervla Murphy and Josie Dew (who was my girlfriend and co-rider on that trip to the Sahara) blazed the trail, but says:

I think more people are now doing long bike trips where in the past they would have backpacked and gone by public transport. It’s becoming an increasingly popular gap year or sabbatical option and some of this is at least partly down to the rise in blogging and social media. Crossing continents by bike is a daunting prospect but seeing all those who have gone before, and being able to follow their every step along the way, gave my husband and I the confidence we could do it ourselves.

Laura and her husband Tim cycled 13,000 miles around the world in 2013/14. They have since set up a database of cycle tours completed by more than 200 cyclists designed to encourage prospective adventurers and provide them with information about costs, routes and other practicalities. She says:

What’s interesting is the range of people who do this kind of trip. Sure, there are lots of white, middle class 20-something blokes, but there are also lots of women, couples and older people on the road too. The beauty is that cycle touring is low skill, cheap and almost anyone could do it.

One of the speakers at the festival will be Tom Allen who, in 2007, cycled from his home near Leicester to Iran. He has since clocked up several thousand more miles cycling through Mongolia, Scandinavia, the US, Australia and New Zealand, meeting his wife, writing a book and making an award-winning film along the way. He says:

From my point of view, the rise of blogging and social media has allowed people doing utterly insane-sounding trips to share their stories, and that’s made it much more of a ‘thing’. Most of the people I come across who are planning big adventures on bicycles aren’t really cyclists. Sometimes they’re outdoor types who are attracted to the physicality and the range of distances you can cover. Sometimes they’re skint and looking for a way to travel far and on the cheap. Sometimes they’ve just read a book or blog about it and thought it sounded awesome.

Had he ever encountered the ridicule from Lycra-clad roadies that I remember from my own cycle touring experiences?

Personally, the main reaction I’ve had from roadies when on fully-loaded, long-term tours is encouragement and a little bit of playful jealousy. I reckon a lot of roadies would, if you pressed them, admit to fostering dreams of epic bike adventures themselves, with their job/wife/kids being the reason they don’t do it.

One fully-fledged roadie who has embraced the cycle-touring renaissance is Josh Cunningham. He set off from Dumfries in Scotland last month on a solo trip to Asia after spending four years racing with some of Belgium’s top amateur teams. Of the ‘rivalry’ between roadies and tourers, he says:

Certainly cycle tourers are mocked by the roadies, but equally MAMILs [Middle Aged Men in Lycra] are laughed at by the tourers. Each know they are at the butt end of jokes, but perhaps the roadies take it a little more to heart with their vanity. My transition has been as smooth as it could have been. It doesn’t bother me that the racing stage of my life on a bike is over. Cycling is far more holistic than that and there are plenty more things to be gained from it.

• The first UK Cycle Touring Festival takes place at Waddow Hall, Clitheroe, Lancashire, from 1-3 May.