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Hi everyone, my name is Alyssa Catalan and today I will be talking to you guys about my experiences with bikes and kind of how my bicycle experiences are kind of different from everyone else.

Okay so to start off, I guess I should talk about my first bike ever. It was one of those Barbie bikes with the pink tassels on the handle bars and training wheels. I thought it was one of the coolest things ever. I didn’t really have any trouble riding the bike with the training wheels, since that kind of did all the balancing for me. But as soon as my uncle wanted me to take the training wheels off and try riding without them, I had little scrapes and scabs all over my knees from falling off. Regardless of the scrapes and scabs, I was having the time of my life with that bike. Eventually I got the hang of balancing myself and ended up with less and less scrapes. My brothers and I would ride up and down the street or in the backyard having races around the apple tree.

However, as my brothers and I got older we started going out less and less. This was because we discovered that the internet was kind of a great thing and that playing Maplestory and online games were great for pass time. Even if we weren’t going out as much, we were still having fun. During this time, I didn’t really ride any bikes.

Fast forward a few years later to last summer, my friends and I went to Google headquarters and decided to ride one of those Google bikes. This was one of the first times I’ve ridden a bike in years, but I was thinking “Oh, like everyone stops riding bikes but as soon as they try they’ll get the hang of it. No one ever really forgets how to ride a bike, right?” Yeah, I was wrong, I got on that bike and fell to the side real quick. This experience came to mind when in the beginning of the semester we read Strickland’s “What Every Kid Wants,” in the reading he says that riding a bike is natural, and that even if you don’t ride for awhile you don’t really forget how to ride. I totally disagree with this, because I completely forgot how to ride a bike. So as of now, the only bikes I can ride are my 5-year old cousin’s bike with the training wheels because I’m so small. Maybe one day I’ll relearn to ride a bike without training wheels.

• SOURCES

My own experiences!

Strickland’s “What Every Kid Wants”