Bicycle bicycle bicycle
I want to ride my bicycle
I want to ride my bike
I want to ride my bicycle
I want to ride it where I like
- Queen (1978)

One of the many benefits of bicycle riding is the new view. It’s a subtle distinction – gliding along, positioned in the street, with my eyes at a slightly different level – but the net effect is to see the world around me in a new way.

So yesterday, peddling along Main Street, I thought it would be fun to share the perspective with my readers. Holding an iPhone steady while riding turns out to be not that easy, and I promise a more refined approach sometime down the road. But I do think my short video (below) communicates the essence of the idea.

Most of the idea is the fact that in the middle of May, with late springtime beginning to give hints of the summer, the canopy of trees bursting with leaves and luminescent with light, the ride up through the historic homes is glorious.

I understand that the exercise is good for me, and that my newly 70-year-old body can use all the help it can get, but at the moment I’m really enjoying the aesthetic. Simply put, you can’t beat the view.

However – and this is very much how I felt the day I completed the pre-dawn climb of Mount Sinai, or when we attained the amazing view of Vernazza while hiking Italy’s iconic Cinque Terre, or taking in the panoramic view of Krakow having walked all the way up to the Wojciecha Park from the Vistula River – it is always a much better view when I also experience the journey.

All this is to say that cycling – like anything worthwhile – is a journey. And the difficult truth is that if I want the benefits to really take hold then I am going to have to put in the effort.

Like the people I ran into at a viewpoint on the Appalachian Trail one day. We were ten miles into the day’s fifteen on our way to more than six hundred miles over two months. They parked their car and sauntered over to snap a quick photograph.

“I don’t get why you’re working so hard for exactly the same view?” one of them said. “I have the same picture on my camera and I’m not even breaking a sweat.”

I thought about telling him that what he was doing was like going to church Sunday morning for the view but not living as a disciple.

Life is a journey. And it’s a better journey when we put in the effort – DEREK