Originally Posted by Walter S

This touches on a tangential subject that I ponder sometimes. I think your perception of the size of the world is influenced by the modes of transportation at your disposal. And this also defines what it takes to satisfy your need for discovery and adventure.

This weekend I accepted an invitation from my sister and nephew to go for a ride in the mountains (in her car). She picked me up early a.m. and we explored all day, including a 5 mile hike at a waterfall I had visited a few weeks ago when I took a one-week ride on my bicycle in that same area. I don't often even ride in a car, much less drive one. What a different way to experience the world! In a day, we effortlessly covered most of the distance that took me a week on the bike.

But there was also such a loss of what I think of as "intimacy" with the environment. Moving down the road at 60 mph you just don't "experience" the world around you on nearly the same level of detail. You don't notice interesting trees, flowers, streams, people's yards, wave hi to folks on the porch. You don't even perceive the hills that got your heart racing on the bike.

But it's not as though the sense of adventure is just absent. It's still there. But in a car you're kind of like a junkie. To get a good fix, you need to bring the widely spread out famous tourists stops to your finger tips. Whereas me, on my bicycle might visit such a place once a day, in a car you might go to five well known beautiful nature stops in a day.

On my bike of course, I'm more experiencing the world the whole time. I make enjoyable discoveries all day, such as a shady spot to eat lunch under a tree next to a church. It's not a landmark. It's nothing to write home about. But it's a discovery nonetheless and satisfies my need for adventure.

The same thing happens when I compare walking to riding the bike. The world gets smaller. I notice things that I don't on a bicycle ride. I go places and stop where I would not on the bike. I think thoughts that I would not think too - it's a different mental state. I don't have my guard up. When walking the world gets smaller. There's tons of interesting things to see and discover and do and enjoy in a 15 mile radius. But on a bicycle you want to go further. The local environment is not so rich. In a car you want to go further still. There's not enough to see just 50 miles from home. And with affordable access to aircraft, a few hundred miles just won't cut it. So you open a vein and pour in the petrol.

Originally Posted by Walter S

You might like to see it. Most people including myself probably would. But unless somebody discovers a high tech clean and affordable source of energy like antimatter or something, it won't matter what we would would like. We may have passed the golden age of convenient travel in the last century. Now, as our mushroomed world population tries to come to grips with what's sustainable for the planet and the life on it, we may all be facing the hard realities of physics