Once upon a time I attended one of those tiny, intense colleges where everyone knew what everyone else had for breakfast and who they had it with.

Although such an atmosphere was generally a downfall, along the lines of not really wanting to know quite so much about your classmates but not having a choice, the tiny intense college had a positive glint in the sun of academia.

Every building could be reached in a matter of minutes, if not seconds. No color-coded buses circled the perimeters, no parking lots miles away pacified the commuters and very few bikes earned their keep.

But, alas, I was not content with a bachelor’s degree, so I launched myself from the midwest bastion of Ohio to the midwest bastion of Iowa. Here I found a nice, big state university with a population my little college mind couldn’t begin to comprehend.

So, thought I, with credit card in hand, a vast university with a vast campus deserves a bike.

So I bought a bike, pretending I understood the new generation of brake systems, the ease of a detachable seat and the metallurgical composition of the frame. I debated long and hard over the attributes of a solid U-lock or a versatile cable. I resurrected my helmet. With one swipe of the trusty Mastercard, the bike and the world were mine.

All I really knew about bikes I didn’t learn in kindergarten or from my cat, but rather from a proper English relationship with a rented blue three-speed.

A trip to the mother country a year ago had me riding daily through the hallowed streets of Cambridge, doing my darnedest to not smash into cathedrals touched by the Henry VIII. I and many of my fellow compatriots hadn’t ridden bikes since we were wee tikes peddling Big Wheels around the subdivisions of our youths.

Displaced into merry old England, we not only had to remind ourselves how we shouldn’t have forgotten bike riding, thanks to a certain clich‚, but we also had to beat into our heads that the left side of the road was right, that right hand turns would be tricky and that England’s road system has those wretched round-abouts, practical death-trap vortexes for awkward Americans wobbling around, lost and loud and doing little to pacify international tension.

But we survived, with only minor scrapes, sore muscles and near accidents with buses and zippy European autos. England was beautiful by bike. England could be beautiful by most anything. The entire experience was a grand confidence builder, since I convinced myself I was a better person for handling (sort of) a vehicle (sort of) in a foreign (sort of) land.

I did manage to have a few flat tires in the process. For some reason, my boyfriend and I decided riding through an admittedly idyllic cow pasture would be a fine way to spend an afternoon. The cows were interesting, and so were the tenacious thorns soon embedded between my treads. Tough English thorns they were, ready to puncture vulnerable tire tubes time and again.

The bike ride turned into a bike walk, and later into a rather informative bike repair session. And I got to repeat the scene a day later, when a few thorns who hadn’t had their fill of disaster deflated yet another tire tube.

I have not had to repair my new bike, despite the chain popping gleefully from the 20 million gears. I don’t even know if having the chain pop off once is a good thing or a bad thing. Like it’s good in the context that the chain has ONLY popped off once, but maybe it’s not so good that it popped off in the first place. Maybe it depends on what I was doing. Like if the bike was stationary, and I wasn’t even on it, then it’s bad, but if I was doing something admirable, like conquering a mountain, then it’s probably OK.

Which brings up another interesting debate. How is it that I managed to purchase a mountain bike in the region least known for mountains? Are there mountains, or maybe just hills wanting to be mountains when they grow up, anywhere in Iowa? My parents say I ought to call it a cornfield bike. Right. Let me throw that idea to the advertising agencies.

But it is ridiculous that I have now planted myself for two years in the dictionary definition of flat, and I have a mountain bike meant to scale inclines a few degrees less than vertical. Anything else absurd I ought to work on while I’m at it?

In England, bikes — by the virtue of being plentiful — hold nearly the same status as cars. Entire groups of bicyclists can move relatively safely between buses and coaches. But I had (and have) no idea of proper American bike etiquette. After I got my new bike home and rode it around the block without being killed or killing anyone, I began to watch how bicyclists maneuver these streets.

Riding bikes on the sidewalk in the Queen’s land was practically punishable by death. SideWALKS were clearly for WALKING. It was those damn English, being all proper. So we rolled ourselves onto the roads, many of which were complemented with ample bike lanes. At a stop light, it was right as scones and tea to filter your way to the front of the line to get a jump on the cars when the light changed. Many riders had friendly little bells, so as not to startle a chap in a dusky alley, and almost all the bikes had headlights and taillights. Even baskets were extremely cool.

In the here and now, I don’t think I could buy a bike basket anywhere in the state. If I had a basket, would I be run off the road? Bikes seem to be all over the place here — the sidewalks, the bike path, the middle of the road, going the wrong way, cutting across the lawn (which could be OK in England, depending on whose lawn you’ve chosen. England takes the term “commons” quite seriously. Want to swing by the fish market, but don’t have a place to park your cattle? Just settle them on the public commons for awhile. If this campus were in England, folks would leave their cows munching in front of Beardshear.).

The deal on this side of the Atlantic seems to be that if the road is clear, ride it, and if the sidewalk is crowded, ride it. I actually observed a fellow determined to not dismount, weave his bike tediously through a thick crowd of students. Just give in, get off or take your mountain/cornfield bike on the grass. At least you won’t have to dodge any cows.

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Jen Hirt is a graduate student in English from Valley City, Ohio.