I was thinking about that when I was dropping my 6 year old off at some hobbies earlier - it’s pretty much expected to have learned how to ride a bicycle before starting school, and it massively expands the area you can go to by yourself. When she went to school by bicycle she can easily make a detour via a shop to spend some pocket money before coming home, while by foot that’d be rather time consuming.
Quite a lot of friends from outside of Europe either can’t ride a bicycle, or were learning it as adult after moving here, though.
edit: the high number of replies mentioning “swimming” made me realize that I had that filed as a basic skill pretty much everybody has - probably due to swimming lessons being a mandatory part of school education here.
Dealing with winter. I live in the rural upper Midwest, where winter can hit -20 with whiteout blizzards, week-long power outages, and car-burying snowdrifts. I’ve seen too many people move here from warmer places and think “I guess I’ll buy a warmer coat and a snow shovel”, rather than “I should have a backup generator, a backup heat source, a few barrels of spare fuel, a month’s worth of stockpiled food, and at least two different pieces of heavy snow-moving machinery tested to be in good working order”.
I had a friend visit from London, (the real one, not one of the many towns in the US) in February one year. I warned him he needed heavy winter gear. I picked him up in Indianapolis. He deboarded the plane in a track suit. I pulled the car as close as I could to the terminal, and he made a mad dash for the car as I loaded his luggage. I asked him if he had any heavy winter gear, and he replied, “I’m wearing it!”
Off to Walmart we go then, I pulled up right next to the door and let him dash inside. Parked the car. Found him bewildered and lost in the women’s clothes section. Took him over to the hunting and sports section to get him a real coat, and coveralls. He was much happier when he left Walmart, and asked me why I didn’t warn him.
I just asked him what he thought it meant when I told him it was -26° C
He said he thought I was exaggerating. SMH
Out of curiosity. How do you deal with week long power outages? I’m assuming you mean in the winter.
I’m in Eastern Ontario. We’re on well water and septic. We also have very dodgy power lines out here (supposedly the lines are over provisioned in this area and high wind days can cause overloads of some kind).
We have a portable generator as well as a wood stove.
Exactly why I will never move back to the Upper Midwest.
I miss being cozy in my living room at night—watching the snow fall down in moonlight.
But that feeling isn’t worth power outages or thinking you can pull out of your driveway without clearing it, just for your car to get stuck and make you late for work.