I grew up in San Diego. We rode our bikes all day all over the place. We rode our bikes all the way out to Mirimar just to watch the jets land (just because we were in love with airplanes. Still are). We rode our bikes to the beach. We rode our bikes to the zoo (kids were free back then). We rode our bikes clear out to the old San Diego River dam the friars had built just to catch crawdads and hauled them all the way home. We played war in and around the canyons near our homes (we had some awesome forts!). And yep, we just had to be home for dinner. Then we went outside and played hide and go seek until our moms called us.
At night we went out and caught fireflys in an empty peanut butter jar and stared for many long moments at them, counting flashes, watching them slowly slow down (oxygen starvation?), who got the most fireflys ? .... we schooled ourselves in science and physics and had no words nor vocabulary for what we learned ..... we weren’t told something and told to remember it .... we actually LEARNED stuff !