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.
Same in central Texas. Moved here from a northern state. It’s much different driving on an icy salted road than an icy road with no salt. Cars don’t rust though. Trees aren’t used to it either, and drop tons of branches if we get freezing rain, causing vehicle and home damage and power outages. The energy grid and water systems aren’t made to handle cold weather either. Though, the energy grid and water systems can barely handle hot weather and droughts.
I don’t wanna sound insensitive but being unprepared killed a couple of Texans during that horrible blizzard, no?
Yeah, I remember reading about a whole family dying because a mother was running her car for heat in a closed attached garage. So, everybody died of carbon monoxide poisoning. I’m sure there were more deaths. Most people have all electric houses, so can’t heat or cook when power goes out. I was without power or water for about a week, but had a gas stove and drinking water stored (became a kinda “prepper” when covid first started).