Shadow Rider: A solo transcontinental bike trek at age 55

Fifty-five and overweight from two years of boarding school food, the author was in danger of becoming a couch potato. When his wife landed a summer job as a park ranger, he saw it as a wake-up call - it was now or never for the transcontinental bike trip he'd been thinking about for years. He had lived and traveled in dozens of countries, climbed in the Alps and Andes, ridden elephants and chased snakes, hitch-hiked through the Khyber Pass, driven through Balkan war zones on holiday, and cycled in much of France, but generally knew little of his own country except for the Northeast. In mid-June, he caught an early morning flight to Seattle, assembled and loaded panniers onto his 21-speed touring bike in Mukilteo, then took the ferry to Whidbey Island. Thus began a seven-week journey that would take him through Washington, a bit of British Columbia, northern Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, brief stretches of Minnesota and Wisconsin, ten days in Michigan, then Ontario, New York, Vermont, New Hampshire and, finally, Maine. A total of 3,832 miles; an average of 76.6 miles a day. The first days he logged only a few miles; on six others, more than one hundred miles. In the end, he had lost twenty-six pounds but found America. This book recounts the author's daily journey through the landscape of America from the shores of Puget Sound, over the Cascade and Rocky Mountains, across the Great Plains and around the Great Lakes to the end of his journey on the Gulf of Maine.