Bicycle Day - It's not what you think

I recently discovered that April 19th is Bicycle Day. Now I've know for a long time that May is National Bike Month, and within that there is a Ride Your Bike to Work Week, and a Ride Your Bike to Work Day, so I was a little confused as to why there would be a Bicycle Day outside of Bike Month.

Well it turns out that Bicycle Day is only peripherally related to riding bicycles. The April 19 event commemorates the day in 1943 when Dr Albert Hofmann rode his bike home fro work after being the first human to ingest a does of LSD, which he invented. From this BBC article:

After taking the drug, Hofmann began to feel unwell, and rode home unsteadily on his bicycle through the streets of Basel. As the journey progressed, things got weird. His vision distorted as if he was looking in a fairground mirror. By the time he made it home, his sense of reality had disintegrated.

Being both an avid bicycle rider and an old hippie one would think I would have known about Bike Day. Maybe that's because my hippie days were spent in the backwoods of Oregon and not in Haight-Ashbury. While I never did ride a bicycle while high on psychedelics, there was one time when I went surfing on mescaline. The most memorable part of that experience was how the water sparkled and the waves curled in slow motion. It was not scary but very peaceful and left me with an overwhelming sense of well being, much like a good bicycle ride.

Tags:
#Bike riding

                    #Nature
                  
                    #Philosophy
                

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