Riding bicycles until sunset

And you better be home when the street lights come on

Jun 17, 2026

That ain’t no lie.

You bet you better be home when the street lights came on.

Now, during the school year, after school, you had until dinner time. But those weekends, especially those summertime weekends . . . you ate up that bowl of cereal, maybe watched a few cartoons, then it was out the door to meet up with your buddies.

The bicycle was our passage to the whole neighborhood. What a car might be to a high schooler, a Huffy or a Schwinn was to us elementary school kids.

A lot of us thought those bicycles with the knobby tires were the way to go. I mean, I started with the smooth cruiser-type tires and the big, wide handlebars, but you could slide and kick up dust A LOT better with the knobby tires.

To be honest, I don’t remember any of us getting too technical with the specs of our bicycles back then. I thought Huffy bicycles with the knobby tires were cool, though . . . just because I thought they went faster.

I also thought Nike tennis shoes were awesome in the 70’s because they had a swoosh stripe on them . . . but, anyway.

So, out the door and down the street to find one of my friends. In my old neighborhood, this was just a shot down the street. But later on . . . it involved a trip through the neighborhood woods. I mean, this was a forest.

You go down this small road, take a left into the wo— . . . I mean, forest. There were three different entrances. All of ‘em led to these trails that wound through the trees, over hills, and around big curves.

It was a big deal. If we got up enough speed, we were gonna fly over those hills.

Sometimes we didn’t even get up a lot of speed and still went flying over those hills . . . but not in the way we wanted to.

Yes, I collected the scars to prove it. 😄

If we got tired of riding through the forest, we had a smaller set of trails. You can think of these trails like an open plain. Not any hills, just big circles to wear yourself out on doing laps. We often acted like we were BMX racers, making engine noises and flying around like nuts.

Now, sometimes our adventures got big, and my friends and I would tour through the neighborhood, a couple of neighborhoods over. Remember, the rule was to be home when the street lights came on.

We didn’t have GPS trackers back then . . . thank goodness 😏.

To tell you the truth, we didn’t really ever have a destination in mind when we headed out on our bicycles. We just went . . . somewhere . . . and that’s where we were. My friends and I just had fun riding bicycles and hanging out.

And when those street lights were starting to flicker on?

I was bookin’ it down that dirt road back to the house.