Summer bike hikes great part of my youth

The start of summer was a great time in my youth. It meant lots of baseball, both organized and sandlot, and bicycling everywhere.

Before we moved to town our summer bike riding included what we referred to as “bike hikes.” This consisted of getting a gang of boys together, packing a lunch of Vienna wienie sandwiches, Cheetos and cherry Kool-Aid. We would then either put the lunch in saddlebags or handlebar bags and come up with a destination.

If the route was likely to hold varmints or desperadoes of some type along the way we would lay our Daisy BB gun across the handlebars and set out. We had too types of turn-row roads in our part of the county, the kind littered with bone-jarring caliche rocks and the blow over in deep red sand. Oftentimes that route got altered because progress through the sand completely stopped us.

After we moved to town and discovered how easy city streets were to ride on and how much fewer goathead flats you had to repair, we rode our bikes everywhere we went.

Down to the end of the block to see a friend, we hopped on a bike, to the pool we biked. To the store for a loaf of bread and can of Vienna Sausages we went on the bike. We rode to school, we rode to the paper office and we delivered our routes on a bike.

Our bike hikes in town took us to Deadman’s Bridge or one of the city parks. By that time in my puberty it was less about the destination and more about hanging out with the guys and trying not to look too queeky in cutoff jeans and tank tops (we called then muscle shirts).

We rode to baseball practice with the wrist strap of our glove hung on a handlebar, a ball or two could be wedged into the frame of the bike usually and then a bat had to be carried on the handlebars the same way we had learned to tote our rifles along in the country.

If you weren’t carrying a bat with you, one of our favorite games of challenge was to put the glove on and pedal along with no hands while throwing the ball up and catching it. That built great hand-eye coordination and led to many a skinned knee and bent up bicycle wheel.

Another bicycling pastime for us was jumping homemade ramps. This was best done somewhere where a parent could not idly glance out the window and see their son flying through the air on two wheels.

We built a BMX track on the vacant lot across the street from our house before BMX was a thing. We had seen motocross at Midway Speedway and figured we could do the same thing on bikes. Guess we weren’t alone because it eventually became a real sport.

Even at night we were on our bikes during the summertime. We cruised the alleyways on our side of town on the lookout for ripening peaches, apples or grapes that were close enough to pick across a fence.

Yeah, no doubt about it, we were the baddest kids on two wheels.

Karl Terry writes for Clovis Media Inc. Contact him at: [email protected]