Do You Remember When You First Learnt to Ride Your Bike?

y'all are too cute. p.s. tomiskinky-- could've just saddled up that dog!

totally all nostalgic now, and wishing i could dig through the boxes of slides at my parents' house.
i do have this one-- okay, so it's a trike, but it was a step up from the Big Wheel (i was not quite three years old):

my first two-wheeler was a christmas gift a few years later, after we'd moved house. i guess i must've been around 7 or 8 years old. it was blue, and way too big for me (my dad stupidly bought it larger than i was, so that i could grow into it). i remember him teaching me how to ride it -- we were on the flat area of our street to the left of our house. i remember hating the training wheels (they made the whole enterprise feel rickety, and it was less scary without them). i also remember taking it out one afternoon, speeding down the steep hill that ran to the right of our house, and the terrible crash at the bottom when i flew into a curb in front of my friend carrie's house. i never rode that bike again. instead, i'd regularly borrow the little red bike owned by another neighbor (megan), until finally my mother took me (without my dad), to get a new bike of my own choosing: a yellow and blue schwinn bmx just like this one: http://genesbmx.bmxair.com/schwinn/catalogs/86pg9.jpg.
it was great for cruising the neighborhood. there was one occasion where i used only the front brake to stop on a hill, went over the bars, and bloodied my chin so that i had a scab goatee for a couple of weeks. we'd play "dirt bikes" in the red clay out by the "power lines", the path through which i'd regularly use to get to my cousin's house, and to the library when it was built the following year.
bicycle + library card= freedom. this was my preferred route: http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=1731130

nb: sort of wish there were archival google maps, cos the area i grew up in has changed a lot since i was a kid...