{
  "path": "/blog/bicycle-day-its-not-what-you-think",
  "site": "at://did:plc:ntnmdg6fuvogzr6khf7agoqf/site.standard.publication/liebs-log",
  "tags": [
    "Bike riding",
    "Nature",
    "Philosophy"
  ],
  "$type": "site.standard.document",
  "title": "Bicycle Day - It's not what you think",
  "description": " \nI recently discovered that April 19th is Bicycle Day. [1] Now I've know for a  \nlong time that May is National Bike Month, [2] and within that there is a  \nRide Your Bike to Work Week, and a Ride Your Bike to Work Day, so I was a  \nlittle confused as to why there would be a Bicycle Day outside of Bike Month.\n\nWell it turns out that Bicycle Day is only peripherally related to riding  \nbicycles. The April 19 event commemorates the day in 1943 when Dr Albert  \nHofmann rode his bike home fro work after being the first human to ingest a  \ndoes of LSD, which he invented. From this BBC article [3]:\n\n>After taking the drug, Hofmann began to feel unwell, and rode home  \n>unsteadily on his bicycle through the streets of Basel. As the journey  \n>progressed, things got weird. His vision distorted as if he was looking in a  \n>fairground mirror. By the time he made it home, his sense of reality had  \n>disintegrated. \n>\nBeing both an avid bicycle rider and an old hippie one would think I would  \nhave known about Bike Day. Maybe that's because my hippie days were spent in  \nthe backwoods of Oregon and not in Haight-Ashbury. While I never did ride a  \nbicycle while high on psychedelics, there was one time when I went surfing on  \nmescaline. The most memorable part of that experience was how the water  \nsparkled and the waves curled in slow motion. It was not scary but very  \npeaceful and left me with an overwhelming sense of well being, much like a  \ngood bicycle ride.\n\n\n[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_Day_(psychedelic_holiday)\n[2] https://bikeleague.org/events/bike-month/\n[3] https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20260410-the-bizarre-story-of-the-worlds-first-lsd-trip\n",
  "publishedAt": "2026-04-18T08:46:08-07:00",
  "textContent": " \nI recently discovered that April 19th is Bicycle Day. [1] Now I've know for a  \nlong time that May is National Bike Month, [2] and within that there is a  \nRide Your Bike to Work Week, and a Ride Your Bike to Work Day, so I was a  \nlittle confused as to why there would be a Bicycle Day outside of Bike Month.\n\nWell it turns out that Bicycle Day is only peripherally related to riding  \nbicycles. The April 19 event commemorates the day in 1943 when Dr Albert  \nHofmann rode his bike home fro work after being the first human to ingest a  \ndoes of LSD, which he invented. From this BBC article [3]:\n\n>After taking the drug, Hofmann began to feel unwell, and rode home  \n>unsteadily on his bicycle through the streets of Basel. As the journey  \n>progressed, things got weird. His vision distorted as if he was looking in a  \n>fairground mirror. By the time he made it home, his sense of reality had  \n>disintegrated. \n>\nBeing both an avid bicycle rider and an old hippie one would think I would  \nhave known about Bike Day. Maybe that's because my hippie days were spent in  \nthe backwoods of Oregon and not in Haight-Ashbury. While I never did ride a  \nbicycle while high on psychedelics, there was one time when I went surfing on  \nmescaline. The most memorable part of that experience was how the water  \nsparkled and the waves curled in slow motion. It was not scary but very  \npeaceful and left me with an overwhelming sense of well being, much like a  \ngood bicycle ride.\n\n\n[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_Day_(psychedelic_holiday)\n[2] https://bikeleague.org/events/bike-month/\n[3] https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20260410-the-bizarre-story-of-the-worlds-first-lsd-trip\n"
}