I was thinking about that when I was dropping my 6 year old off at some hobbies earlier - it’s pretty much expected to have learned how to ride a bicycle before starting school, and it massively expands the area you can go to by yourself. When she went to school by bicycle she can easily make a detour via a shop to spend some pocket money before coming home, while by foot that’d be rather time consuming.
Quite a lot of friends from outside of Europe either can’t ride a bicycle, or were learning it as adult after moving here, though.
edit: the high number of replies mentioning “swimming” made me realize that I had that filed as a basic skill pretty much everybody has - probably due to swimming lessons being a mandatory part of school education here.
Canoeing. I’m not an outdoorsy guy at all but everytime I see US tourists in a canoe they just spin in circles. It feels like Canadians are just born knowing.
That might just be a growing up near water thing. I think that on average, Canadians live closer to larger bodies of water than Americans do, since more than half are within day trip distance of the great lakes waterway, and then there’s Halifax and Vancouver.
Growing up in a place with water, basically everyone I know also has at least a passing knowledge of recreational small watercraft.
Canada also has a strong cottage culture, where families will spend time in the summer at a cottage, or campground, or other, and they are often on lakes (we have so many lakes, they’re just everywhere, at least where people live.) I don’t specifically remember learning how to canoe, but I think it happened initially on a field trip with school when I was really young. That being said, not all Canadians know how to canoe. I had to teach a friend of mine how to properly paddle when canoeing solo because he had just never been taught. Ironically, it was his canoe we were using.
Canoeing is definitely a big thing in the US. At least in the east, I suspect it’s much less common in the Midwest and desert states. I think that tourists are disproportionately likely to be canoeing for the first time, though.
That said, if you can’t figure out the physics of a canoe within the first couple strokes then maybe boating as a while just isn’t your thing
I have no difficulty with the “basic” canoes, but I struggle with the long and thin ones, where I can’t even keep myself upright for longer than 30 seconds, before capsizing, having tried a few times. Is boating not my thing?
J stroke baby