I was the first person in my immediate family to drive a motor vehicle. The good and (mostly) not so good of those are described elsewhere. Not having a car wasn't unusual in that time and place, and I used bicycles as primary transport for quite a few years. The world was smaller then, of course, and ten miles was a long way. My first bicycle was a hand-me-down Rudge, which was rather nice with what are now known as "moustache" handlebars, a Sturmey-Archer 3-speed hub, alloy rims, Brooks saddle. The works! Nice bicycle, and it carried me for many miles. Something that I really wanted, though, was a more transportable bicycle to take with me on canal boats when I begged rides (described elsewhere) and Alex Moulton had just put his idea of what a bicycle should be on the market, including the Moulton Stowaway.
The Moulton wasn't a folding bike. It separated into two pieces at the main tube.
The bars were narrow for easy stowage and there were no front-to-rear connections. This was arranged by using a coaster brake (back-pedal brake in England) and by having only two gears (too low and much too low) that shifted each time the pedals moved backwards. Yes, this does mean that using the rear brake shifted gear, but you learned to live with it. The interesting thing is that the picture on the left shows the original Moulton Stowaway made in the early 1960s, while the picture on the right is the new Bridgestone Moulton, made in Japan and soon to be available in Europe. More than a passing resemblance, I think.
Anyway, I rode a lot of miles until the day that my first motorcycle became rideable, at which point internal combustion became important to me. I used the Moulton in Holland for a while, although I seriously thought I might die when I ran out of energy late one night returning from the home of a friend who lived on a New Polder to my home on the Old Polder. The location is worth noting because the New Polder has an altitude of -30 ft and the my home had an altitude of 0ft. Not a lot of climbing in twelve miles.
So, apart from going to work on a bicycle in Holland and in Madrid (along the shoulder of the main Madrid-Barcelona highway, another near-death experience) bicycles passed out of my life until, like many others, I saw one of the early mountain bikes and thought "hey...!". So I bought one, and started riding it. I still have it, and although it's a real antique, it's still a usable but heavy mountain bike. Not that I use it off-road much, of course. I enjoyed riding locally (Washington DC) but the real leap was when I went on a supported bicycle vacation in Vermont. In May. In mostly wonderful weather. I was hooked, and also realized that a road bike was much better for riding on the road than a mountain bike (surprise!), so I acquired a Cannondale road bike.
More local riding followed and then another vacation, this time on the coast of Maine in high summer. The coast of Maine is quite lovely, and a bicycle may be the best way to see it. I started riding with the local club and rode about 5,000 miles a year for a while.
Nowadays I've become fat and lazy, thanks to the resurgence of an old love (boats), but it's time to do some more miles. I have too many bicycles in the shed: