In June 2005, Nicole Grohoski, Caitlin Prentice, and Jonathan Stuart-Moore, freshly graduated from Middlebury College in Vermont, embarked on an ambitious cycling adventure from Maine to Oregon, equipped with route maps created by Nicole and Caitlin for a college project charting a hypothetical cross-country bike trip. The bikers covered over 4000 miles in eleven U.S. states and one Canadian province over the course of three eventful months, adding a fourth member, Meryl Estes, in Caitlin's hometown of Traverse City, Michigan. Their mass emails to friends and family, written from the road on a near-weekly basis, chronicle encounters with friends, strangers, law enforcement officials, wildlife, extraordinary landscapes, and memorable cultural phenomena including irrational motorists, fried cheese curds, and, above all, the kindness and generosity of the people they met along the way.
Eight entertaining emails from the bikers are collected here together with emails exchanged between the bikers' parents at journey's end; the introduction to From Sea to Shining Sea: A Bike Tour of the USA, Caitlin and Nicole's college geography project; a route map charted by Nicole; and illustrations by Charles Mahal.
Edited by Marissa Gemma and Allison Stielau, cartography by Nicole Grohoski, design and typography by Anne Callahan.
64 pages including 12 illustrations, three-part route map, and index. 800 copies offset-printed by The Stinehour Press in Lunenburg, Vt. and Smyth-sewn by New Hampshire Bindery in Concord, N.H. in May 2008.