I’ve noticed with my kids I have to know where they are basically at all times. Leave school, go to friends house, I get notified. On weekends if they go from one house to the other, I need to know.
When I was a kid, I would get up and on my bike around 7-8am, would not be back until dark at least, and just go… anywhere? Ride 10 miles across the whole town, through construction, to the creek or up the big ass hill a little outside of town? Sure. And the wild thing about this is that it was completely normal.
When I was a kid, I would get up and on my bike around 7-8am, would not be back until dark at least, and just go… anywhere? Ride 10 miles across the whole town, through construction, to the creek or up the big ass hill a little outside of town? Sure. And the wild thing about this is that it was completely normal.
That sounds awesome, bicycles give you superpowers in landscapes that aren’t violently hostile to anything that isn’t cars. I grew up on the side of a highway, I could only bike up and down my driveway basically.
Now I take so much pleasure in just shooting over to the grocery store on my bike. Every single time I do it I am thankful because of how much that capacity was utterly denied by where I grew up.
Must have been a wonderful chaos to tool around on a bicycle as a kid like an idiot going wherever you wanted. Every single god damn thing I ever did had to be mediated through a car and thus an adult directly facilitating a specific activity I wanted to go do. There was zero capacity to spontaneously just go and roam.
oh, absolutely. I’ve never really lived in a proper city (bigger towns, maybe) so it’s still possible now, but the culture has def moved on. I mean, I see the occasional kids on bikes, but when I was a kid (80’s - 90’s) pretty much every kid had a bike and this was just the default.
We even did that without maps. If we got lost, we just rode around until we recognized something familiar.
I’ve noticed with my kids I have to know where they are basically at all times. Leave school, go to friends house, I get notified. On weekends if they go from one house to the other, I need to know.
When I was a kid, I would get up and on my bike around 7-8am, would not be back until dark at least, and just go… anywhere? Ride 10 miles across the whole town, through construction, to the creek or up the big ass hill a little outside of town? Sure. And the wild thing about this is that it was completely normal.
That sounds awesome, bicycles give you superpowers in landscapes that aren’t violently hostile to anything that isn’t cars. I grew up on the side of a highway, I could only bike up and down my driveway basically.
Now I take so much pleasure in just shooting over to the grocery store on my bike. Every single time I do it I am thankful because of how much that capacity was utterly denied by where I grew up.
Must have been a wonderful chaos to tool around on a bicycle as a kid like an idiot going wherever you wanted. Every single god damn thing I ever did had to be mediated through a car and thus an adult directly facilitating a specific activity I wanted to go do. There was zero capacity to spontaneously just go and roam.
oh, absolutely. I’ve never really lived in a proper city (bigger towns, maybe) so it’s still possible now, but the culture has def moved on. I mean, I see the occasional kids on bikes, but when I was a kid (80’s - 90’s) pretty much every kid had a bike and this was just the default.