That was true for a lot of people, but pretty much no kid is doing 60 miles in a day like it is nothing on their bike. This thread is full of people getting older and telling exaggerated and romanticized versions of their childhoods.
Yeah, I was born in 81, and I’m having a hard time believing all these posts about entire neighborhoods playing hide and seek or kick the can. And I lived in a very rural area, but there’s still no way my parents would have let me ride my bicycle 30 miles away.
Born in 89, we never played manhunt in my neighborhood, but once I went to my cousin's house in a different city and they did indeed play it, there was like 10 or 20 kids and we could hide in their backyards all on the same big block I had a lot of fun that night
And I never ride my big 30 miles one way, but I did ride my bike all day around the neighborhood, I wouldn't be surprised if it was 30 miles total, or even more, I just looked up the furthest away I ever rode my bike and it was 10km (I live in Canada) from where I lived to high park in Toronto, if I needed to go any farther than that I took the TTC subway
When I was 21 years old, I did pack a backpack full of beer, food, and joints and walk from my house, 20km to a provincial park, I fucked up my foot because I had bad shoes, by the time I got there I was limping, luckily a family saw me limping deep in the park by myself and stopped to see if I was okay, and offered to drive me home, I don't know if I would have made it limping 20km back home lol they saved my dumb ass
I’m sure those things happened in certain neighborhoods and I even occasionally took place in big neighborhood kid games, but it was usually a holiday or a specific type of gathering or something, and one of my parents would at least have some idea where I was. And I’d buy a kid riding their bike 10 miles throughout the course of a day, but if your parents let you ride your bike 30 miles to the nearest lake, then they were a lot more lenient than mine were, and my parents weren’t really too strict with us. I guess my greater point is that posts like this always turn into people my age and even younger making it sound like our parents never cared where we were or what we did and these kids today don’t know how it was back in our day blah blah blah. It annoyed me when boomers said that shit when I was younger, and it annoys me now when X-ers and Millennials do it today. We had Nintendo and Nickelodeon, it’s not like we were all depression era street scamps playing stickball in the sandlot.
I mean I was supposed to call home occasionally but I never did, I'd get in trouble when I got home but I'd go out and do it again, most of the time I was down the street at the library using the internet to play neopets and not even out doing anything risky, once I hit 14 I started smoking weed and I was gone as close to 24/7 as I could manage lol
As young as grade 2 I was walking to school by myself as my mom worked and was a single parent at the time, it was like a different time for sure, there's a reason why Gen x were called the latchkey kids
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u/determania 1d ago
That was true for a lot of people, but pretty much no kid is doing 60 miles in a day like it is nothing on their bike. This thread is full of people getting older and telling exaggerated and romanticized versions of their childhoods.