Just this morning, my wife and I biked about 12 miles on the Cady Way Trail, a peaceful, meandering path just east of downtown Orlando. It was a perfect "date morning" as we called it, the kids left behind with a babysitter.
So ... there we were, just the two of us, pedaling through the amazing spring day, flowers blooming, warm breezes blowing, our uncomplicated moments strung together into pure bliss.
"Nothing compares to the simple pleasure of a bike ride," John F. Kennedy once said.
Albert Einsten, pictured above, took a more philosophical view: "Life is like riding a bicycle: in order to keep your balance, you must keep moving."
Ernest Hemingway put it well: "It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them. Thus you remember them as they actually are, while in a motor car only a high hill impresses you, and you have no such accurate remembrance of country you have driven through."
I'm not sure who Bill Emerson is or was, but his description of bicycling in a 1967 issue of The Saturday Evening Post captured it with particular poignancy: "A bicycle does get you there and more ... and there is always the thin edge of danger to keep you alert and comfortably apprehensive. Dogs become dogs again and snap at your raincoat; potholes become personal. And getting there is all the fun."
Below is proof of my ability to still ride a wheelie, at the ripe old age of 43. My wife used her BlackBerry to snap this shot of me showing off this morning.