A woman’s bike gives her a little more freedom
opening the countryside to her wanderings.
And what a marvel this double-wheeled invention
with its “hard beetle back” seat requiring reasonably strong
legs, a comfortable sense of balance and the love of speed.
They can “lean so low into the carved wrist of the road
to break would kill them.”

In the golden age of bicycling many writers cycled
from Simone de Beauvoir whose letters to Jean-Paul
Sartre were full of the joys of bicycling to Arthur Conan Doyle
and his wife Louisa who rode in tin-type tandem.

Two hundred years have come and gone and still
there are women who love their bikes:
“I am-as always-a woman on a bike. Although I do
not know where this road will lead, the way is
not lost, for I have arrived here.”