I rode my bike 5.3 km each way, before checking with google maps I could have sworn it was more than 10km.
My elementary school walk was just down the street and three blocks down, but one of those blocks was around a the corner where lived a man who fed the pigeons two loaves of bread every morning, and my walk took me under the power lines where the pigeons sat.
What’s really funny was that the pigeon feeder’s next-door neighbor was a gun enthusiast (and yes, a Vietnam Vet) who was as fastidious a groundskeeper as his neighbor was lax, and who enjoyed shooting those pigeons on occasion. Seriously… it was like an ongoing Guano War between those two.
In five years of walking that gauntlet, I never sustained a direct hit (by the birds or anything else), but there were a few close calls with the poop splats!
My walk to high school was 1.4 miles, as clocked by several cars’ odometers. When I was in school, the bus was provided to anyone living more than 1.5 miles away. Today, they’ll bus to the middle school if you ask, which was about 4 blocks away.
No big hills, but no matter how you walked, there were inclines both ways. Having had very long hair back then, and being too cool and cocky to wear a hat, there were quite a few February mornings where my hair froze.
The beach was 8 miles away (again, clocked by odometer), and in the summer we would bike it often (2-3 times per week). We were young and full of energy. That was uphill both ways, as there was a sizable hill just before the beach’s entrance. Having biked to the beach and fooling around all day (not that type of fooling around - get your minds out of the gutter), the first thing that would face our tired, thirsty teenage bodies on the trip home was the steeper side of the hill leaving the beach. Fortunately, once crested, 7-11 was there and cheap Slurpees gave our next-to-broke bodies the sugar it needed to complete the trek home.
My son, who lives with his mother in suburbia, has no concept of going anyplace my ‘manual’ transport. My daughter, raised in Queens, is much better about using her two legs to get her where she wants to go.
Aw, I used to walk home from school all the time. Usually while reading. Three to five miles, depending on the school.
After years of using a bicycle as my primary form of transportation, I became convinced that my entire city is uphill both ways. When I got a job in the restaurant on the top floor of a nine-story hotel, I found out I was correct. Two of the main avenues through downtown are one-way streets, and a lot of my bicycling has been done on those two streets (they’re safer for biking than the two-way main drag). While gazing out the hotel restaurant windows at a panoramic view of the city, I looked at these one-way streets.
Sure enough, northbound Mission Street slopes gently uphill to the north, and southbound Chelan Avenue slopes gently uphill to the south. As these two streets are only a block apart, I’m not sure how the city planners managed this feat.
My elementary school was only a couple of blocks away, and although it was only uphill on the way home, it was a steep enough hill that going down was nearly as difficult, especially in inclement weather.
When my daughter first started school, it was only a couple of blocks away. Then my city decided to tear down all the elementary schools and build shiny new K - 8s, only one of which had a gifted program. Naturally, that was the one clear across town. The school bus was only available to students who lived two or more miles away. We lived 1.98 miles away. (They were unswayed by my suggestion that she qualifed if she left by the back door.) So starting at age ten, my daughter had to take a city bus to school. It was… not ideal. The bus stop was only about four blocks away, but she had to cross an extremely busy street to get there, and the bus was notoriously unreliable in bad weather. (Whereas in good weather, it was only annoyingly unreliable. :rolleyes: ) My daughter wound up taking a lot of taxis to school over the next four years.
My elementary school was exactly 1 mile from my house on Google maps, and that follows the route I walked most often. When I got to 5th grade we got a bus, but I never rode it. As a matter of fact, my punishment for not riding the bus was being not allowed to ride the bus. I guess it makes some sense in an odd way.
My junior high appears to have been 3.5 miles from my house. Yes, I walked that too. I always enjoyed the trip.
Nostalgically interesting thread. I went to nine different public schools in four states. I know the one in California involved at least a two-mile walk, including a big patch of desert where I used to catch lizards and once found a stash of Adam skin mags.
In Kindergarten I lived in a house where the school yard butted up against my back yard. No streets to cross. You couldn’t see the school from our house, there was a small hill there (uphill both ways) and a row of trees (Google maps shows the dead end street was extended and a lot more houses, but there is my house, the row of trees and the school, just like I remember from 35 years ago).
I got in trouble for walking home. One of the neighborhood moms was supposed to pick us up and was late - probably not very late, but I was five. So I walked home - the teacher was there and I remember saying “just tell them I walked.”