Mobility Memories, part 2: A Bicycle for the Kid.

?I got it! I got it!?

That was what I was screaming in our garden one day in the early nineties, when I finally figured out how to ride a bike without support. An immediate evergreen in our family's collective memory that was recounted many times since then, I felt an incredible joy and pride to have mastered this vehicle which up until that point has given me so many scratches and bruises from many painful falls.

Spoiler: The falls occurred less often since then but when I did fall they were more severe, me breaking fingers or cracking a rib. However, the freeing feeling of hopping on a bike and just going on any surface over the tiniest paths never went away. I always get back on a bike.

This comes from my parents. Early in my childhood, biking was a big part of our life. Both functional, when we walked or biked for grocery shopping and looked like aliens in a neighbourhood of car-heavy parking lots. But also recreationally, first when we sent off my dad for annual week-long trips with his biking friends – and later, when I was old enough to bike with him to the higher and higher peaks in the border region to Slovenia close to our home.

Countless memories have me going to the lake for swimming in summer, visiting my aunt in the state capital, combining train travel and biking for longer distances, up to the cold covid winters when my wife and I started biking across Vienna all-year round. She now bikes more than me, which makes both proud of her and also a bit anxious for her safety.

Because most of my memories, as enjoyable as they were, there’s always an element of fear. From the intentional way to pack my mat so it would stick out half a meter, to the actual blinkers we used so cars would cut us, to the many trucks speeding up to us from the back, the countless honks we receive to this day, the missing bike lanes or the ones that just end abrubtly, or to the day I got my official biking license as a 12-year old when during the test I was told I incorrectly passed illegally parked cars by the policeman assessing my ride.

Many times, I was stubborn on the street defending my space and that stance was only reinforced by the many good reasons to bike I saw, by my upbringing, the books I read (my favourite back as a kid was called “the best bicycle in the world” and I was in love with it), by the lack of infrastructure, and of course because of the beautiful bikes I rode.

The first was a red hot kids bike I learned with, then a proper teenage bike, before I started riding my dad’s old turquoise Peugeot road bike and the orange Kirsch long-distance “courier” bike he gave to my grandfather. These two I took to Vienna later, where one was stolen and the one I crashed and repaired so many times that no shop would take it up anymore – so I sold it to a hipster and she loved it. After that, for the first time I bought a new bike myself, at the age of 37. Long time for a bike crack.

With this, I do everything. And the best memories I create when I do more than I would have ever expected. This bike has no limits – although it has only three gears (in a city, you only need one to go up, down or flat).

I don’t need anything else. My wife and I are always joking that we’ll only get e-bikes when we’re retired.

But that’s still a long way to go.