Walking is so quaint; I remember walking.  Walking is what I did before I started biking.  Just like crawling is what I did before I started walking.  One day I learned to do something new, and there was no need to go back.  Two wheels are a lot more efficient than two feet.  Not to mention more fun.  A walk across campus that would normally take fifteen valuable minutes away from my life is a three minute ride.  Add the exhilaration of zooming around past lumbering pedestrians, and the magical sense of a two-wheeled vehicle staying upright, and walking really can't compete.  Most of the time.
          Admittedly, walking is romantic.  In the literal sense, you can walk with someone, whereas you can only really bike next to someone.  And usually, it's behind, not next to.  The only bikers skilled enough to hold hands while pedaling tend to instead focus their efforts at climbing French mountain passes.  Side by side, four feet on the ground, two people can talk, without helmets over their ears or wind in their faces.  When walking with someone, two minds must work together to perform the physical activity, lest one body trail the other.  Two people are having the same experience together.
          There's plenty more romantic about walking.  You can walk places and times you can't bike:  through the woods, the city, the rain, the snow, and the night.  I'm often frustrated at the start of a hike up a mountain by the underwhelming pace, because the rest of life goes at the speed of Amtrak, DSL, the New Jersey Turnpike, and TiVo.  But once acclimated to the slower rate of stimulation, I can enjoy being a part of a place in a way that is impossible at anything quicker than seven miles per hour.  You not only see your surroundings, but you become familiar with them.  The drainage ruts on the side of the road, the sign that says “Goats for sale”, the goats, the smell of the goats, the trees with surprisingly large leaves, the rocks that from a car you would never know were metamorphic schist.  You can cover more ground in two miles by foot than in twenty by pedal (or two hundred by engine).
          In eleventh grade, I desperately liked a certain girl who didn't care one way or the other about me.  She lived in a different neighborhood than I, but once my family spent the weekend at friends in that neighborhood, and that Saturday afternoon, I decided to walk over.  Rain was falling at a rate somewhere between drizzle and steady downpour.  Though I was walking at a regular clip, my heart, of course, was at a gallop.  There were puddles on the sidewalk, in square shapes, representing sunken sections of concrete.  I walked up to her front door, forced myself to knock, and waited a good ten minutes before accepting that no one was home.  The dreary rain made the situation archetypically pathetic.  Aware of the perfect piteousness, I chuckled, and walked back underneath the clouds.
          Since then, my family moved into that neighborhood, and during a recent summer, I biked every day to and from work.  Work was downtown, 11 miles away, and biking was a fantastic way to start and end a day spent primarily in front of Microsoft Excel.  I love to tell my non-self-propelled friends who are already impressed by this, “Oh, it's not that bad, it's all downhill,” and watch their faces as they adjust from accepting this mitigation to realizing that I'm going both directions.  Well, I designed my route such that I went past the girl’s house every day, on the off-chance that she might be standing outside her house just waiting to see me in my work-ready argyle socks, spandex shorts, and Vassar-pink jersey.  Each trip, the moment of tension lasted about six tenths of a second, the time to took to ride by and see that she was not standing on the sidewalk with flowers and a smile.  And after that, it was all downhill.