Originally Posted by wheel
Yea right on Roody,
This is one reason I moved from the big cities of the East Coast. Nature is free and does not cost anything. The desert is an amazing palce to watch a sunset/sunrise, go for a hike, or sit ontop of a 25oo ft mountain and look out at the city below at night. This is a magical place and I never have to venture to far from my apt. if I want solitude.
Yeah...the desert is great, so are mountains and the beach. What we have here for wildness is fields, forests and swamps, and they're great too. It sounds like you enjoy going out on your bike and exploring your little world, just like I do.
One good thing about cycling in an exploratory manner is that you really start to understand and appreciate the geography of your location. For example, on my rides I've been able to see that much of the woods within the city are located on a floodplain, so houses were never built there, and the land has stayed pretty wild and free, with development all around it. Out west, canyons are often like that too. Around here, Michigan State University has huge research farms south of their campus, so that region has never been urbanized either.