Check your location before jumping on that bike without any cover

If you’ve been wondering where you can ride a bike where there’s nothing between you and a sweaty bike seat, a website called lawnstarter.com, which seems normally to actually be about lawn care, did a study that showed the best and worst places to ride your bike the way you came into the world.

They ranked 200 cities and number one was Chicago, followed by Portland and Seattle. You would think, due to weather concerns, that the opportunity to do anything naked outdoors in these locations would be limited to a few months in the middle of the year. But when the air is warm in these noted cold weather places, they apparently take advantage of it.

I’ll give you one guess as to which state had the worst city for naked bike riding. That’s right, Tennessee, in the great city of Clarksville. I know nothing at all about Clarksville, but I’d guess it’s completely conservative and filled with fat guys with beards who sigh all the time as they realize they’re incredibly intelligent while everybody else is astoundingly stupid.

The closest city to us, Knoxville, ranked as the 163rd best city to ride naked in, or the 37th worst, depending on how you look at it.

How did lawnstarter.com decide which cities were conducive to being Lady Godiva on a bike.

They said, “We first assessed the regulatory landscape in each city to help naked bikers avoid legal (and other) bumps on the road. We then considered the local popularity of naked biking, the size and activeness of the cycling community, and, of course, the climate.”

Believe it or not, there are cities in America where being naked in public is just shrugged at. There are four where if you suddenly drop trou on Main Street, literally nothing will be done to you, led by Austin, Texas, which must really stand out in that state.

If you hate deciding what to wear every day, four of the top five cities with the most nudists are located in Florida, with the only outlier being Atlanta, of all places.

If you think you need to be covered from head to toe to hide your shame, four of the five cities with the fewest nudists can be found in Nevada, though none of them are Las Vegas. The only outlier is in Florida, a state that makes little sense.

Most of the cities that are naked biking friendly hold annual rides where you can safely ride around in your natural glory and if you look around the internet you can find pics from them. Purely for research, I did some searching and the first thing you notice is that these people seem fairly eager to have their no clothes wearing picture taken beside their bikes.

The second thing you notice is … how can I put this nicely? If you were asked who you’d like to see riding a bike with no clothes on, with a couple of exceptions, these people probably wouldn’t be your first choice.

It’s not because they’re in bad shape. The bike riding, almost by default, would keep them in shape, but most of them … well, they’re old. I’m not a spring chicken by any definition, but some of these people look old enough to have been driving and raising a family when I was born. And I was born a LONG time ago.

I once heard somebody say one of the most disappointing things they’d ever done was go to a nude beach.

“It’s not the beautiful people!” they declared with horror.

People who like to get naked where there’s nowhere the sun doesn’t shine will tell you it’s not a salacious thing. And that would appear to be true. There’s no signs of, um, excitement anywhere in these pictures. Just people doing things that normally would involve clothing.

Speaking for myself, I doubt riding a bike is something I could handle nowadays, clothes or not. In my boyhood days, I had a blue three speed and rode it all over Sweetwater. Those were the days you left the house in the morning without telling anybody and didn’t come home until it was nearly dark and no one cared!

But we had clothes on, much to the relief of everybody involved.