Just back from a long bike ride – approximately 35 miles. For some, that isn't too long, but it is for me. It took a little over two hours.

I usually ride alone. This promotes a lot of mind-wandering introspection. All the usual brain traffic disengages and thoughts float along. The solutions to various problems often present themselves.

There are those who will tell you that the bicycle is the greatest invention ever, but I’m not one of them. Not because I don’t believe it (I probably do) but because of my reluctance to speak in absolutes. Isn’t the wheel touted as the greatest invention ever? And bikes have two of them! But then, cars have four, and semi-trailers have god knows how many. Does that make them exponentially better?

“The bicycle is a curious vehicle,” someone once observed. “Its passenger is its engine.” And this is one of the things that make bikes great: they allow you to travel point-to-point and, as its engine, get some exercise while you do it. This is a powerful argument in their favor as greatest invention, or among the greatest. Between planet-threatening emissions and fluctuating gas prices, there may never have been a better time to embrace this form of human powered transportation as the ideal way to get where you need to go.

“Other forms of transport grow daily more nightmarish,” Iris Murdoch declared. “Only the bicycle remains pure in heart."

Indeed. There is a magnificent silence to bicycles that speaks to this purity, and has enormous appeal for me. This may be most evident when riding, as today, through some rural area in the early hours of a summer morning, when the only sounds are the steady clicking of bike’s freewheel, and the occasional warbling of a meadowlark. These are what I think of as bicycle moments. Often they are very fleeting, but they speak directly to the bike’s purity of heart: moments of blissful quietude that you can only experience on two wheels.

Of course, bikes have their limitations. Few are willing to pedal to work in sub-freezing temperatures. Biking to the airport to pick up grandma and her three suitcases is out of the question. But for running simple errands around town, bicycles – weather permitting – are ideal.

The best thing about bicycles, though, may be that they are just plain fun.