I didn't learn how to ride a bike until I was 32 years old.
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I didn't learn how to ride a bike until I was 32 years old.
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Is this you?
While we're on the subject of bikes, I actually did really cool things with a bike when I was a kid. I lived in what is now called Denali National Park when I was in grades 5 through 8. The Park has a single access road which is about 90 miles long, only the first 12 of which are paved. My family took a bike trip out that road and back when I was ~11 years old. We carried backpacks on our bikes and took about 10 days for the trip, including a layover of a couple of days at the farthest campground on the route. Everyone else in the family had ten-speeds, but I was riding my trusty blue Schwinn Stingray monospeed, coaster-braked bike. It was geared the equivalent of about third gear for the rest of the family, so going up hills was no problem. But I had a heck of a time going fast enough on anything even slightly downhill. My family took a number of creek-side breaks waiting for me to catch up to them!
Just an amazing trip. I have many memories of great scenery, great people we met along the way, incredible (and occasionally slightly scary) animal encounters, and just a generally really fun time. It was about as cool a bike trip as one could take.
We did it again a couple years later, with bike bags this time, except we did it faster and by that time I had a ten-speed.
She does indeed. BD finished 3rd in the mile run that day. That was for the kids too old for tricycles. I also remember Betsy Ross winning the tricycle race. It made the local news, Frank Thompson reported on it. Frank Thompson was a long time local TV news reporter who was good at finding the heartwarming human interest stuff and he lived in our hood, so our 4th of July bash got the coverage.
I've reported here before that I came up with my own Bicentennial project, yes? I memorized Paul Revere's Ride by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and recited it my backyard on the 200th anniversary (April 18, 1975) while a group of neighborhood kids acted it out behind me. My younger brother was Paul Revere. We performed for a few invited guests (mostly the parents of the kids who acted it out behind me). I'm going to do it again with some theater friends for the 250th. Don't know where yet - not my backyard though.
Btw, aimo, my younger brother won the 4th of July tricycle race one year, but he was too old by 1976. Looking back on it now, the 4th of July celebrations in our hood were fantastic. I've never lived anywhere else that did the 4th of July better than we did in the 1970s.