Bikes and Trails One of the best purchases I made during the Covid-19 pandemic was a gravel bike, the acquisition made much easier with the stimulus check I received from the federal government. I was lucky to find the bike, because in the wake of massive lay-offs, bike manufacturing slowed way down, and the existing supply was being rapidly depleted as folks bought bikes and pretty much every other type of recreational equipment to help fill their free time. For me, getting a bike re-connected me to an important part of my youth, satisfied some local wanderlust, and was an easy way to maintain some of the aerobic fitness that typically peaks for me at the end of the ski season.I think for the vast majority of kids from my generation a bicycle was a huge part of their lives—the small-scale parallel of the adult world, where the car or motorcycle was the key to mobility across the landscape and a symbol of personal freedom. For sure, my friends and I felt free to go where we pleased on our bikes, the radius traveled from home increasing as we aged. By the time we were on the cusp of getting our driver’s license, that radius was as far as fifteen miles, mostly to access local lakes and streams to fish—or to explore the rapidly vanishing pockets of somewhat wild land remaining in suburbia. I believe every kid today, no matter what, should own a bike or have easy access to one.Biking, like so many other sports or activities, has morphed and splintered into a wide variety of niches, and the new technologies and materials applied to bikes has made them lighter and more efficient to ride than ever. Think carbon fiber and titanium. And if you like to ride on a variety of terrains, you will need more than one bike. That road bike ain’t gonna be fun to ride on gravel, and that gravel bike might be outgunned on some single tracks–or on snow. Some(electric bikes or “ebikes”) even have battery- powered motors to assist the rider on uphills or anywhere else they mig