Don’t all kids love to ride bikes?   Mine sure do.
            In any kind of weather too.  They just love to ride bikes.

There is just something that sets you free on a bike.  The wind in your face and everything moving past you faster than you can do on your own feet is powerful too.  It breaks bariers that go beyond what your body can do on its own. 



When I was young, I loved to ride bikes too.  For many years riding, was just for fun.  But as I got older, it became a viable way of transportation for me.

For three years, I rode a bike two miles one way to school and this really cut down on a long boring walk.  In those days, in Tonganoxie Kansas,  if you lived within two miles of the school, you had to walk or get a ride to school, because the school bus would not stop for you.  So bike riding really was a necessity for me.

Later as a teenager, I got a job four miles from where I lived at a Christmas tree farm in Basehor, Kansas.  That was the best ride ever.  It covered lots of terrain, including farms, town, and some up hill and some down hill riding too.  The variety was really fun.  But eventually, when I was about seventeen, I took a job as a cashier at Walmart, and that was about 15 miles away.  Soon, I started driving wherever I needed to go, and the bike was rode less and less.

As an adult, I used my bike on campus to get to classes and around town.  But eventually, my job was farther than I wanted to ride, and I started driving everywhere.   I put my bike away.  I stopped riding.  Eventually, I gave my bike away to another young person who needed one.    

But when I stopped riding, I lost that sense of freedom and fun that I once loved. 



Over the past few years, we have moved three times.  We moved from the farm in Indiana to a rented house in a gated subdivision in Hendersonville, NC.  Then, a little over a year later, we bought a house out in the country in a little subdivision.  This presented some challenges in changing how we ride our bikes.  But the kids didn’t let it stop them.

On the farm, the kids rode their bikes on a long gravel drive.





Once we moved to NC, they rode their bikes along trails and sidewalk paths in a gated community,



with lots of steep hills on the side of a mountain,



but still they had fun just riding in front of the driveway,



or in a tiny backyard,



and now on a culdesac in a subdivision in the country. 



The kids have made the most of riding their bikes, where ever we have been.

Seeing my children, and their love for riding their bikes, has reminded me how much fun riding a bike can be.