Just Keep Pedaling

Just Keep Pedaling, by T.E. Trimbath ★
This book is the story of some dude who works for Boeing and lives in Seattle, who takes the autumn off to ride his bicycle diagonally across America. With a 1 week interruption because of a broken bicycle in Oklahoma, and a year interruption in Pensacola, Florida because of the depletion of funds, he finally makes it to the Florida Keys and then back home. There are many aspects of his trip that I thought was a touch bizarre. He undertakes this entire venture on a bicycle very poorly designed to do this trip. He rides the interstate highway system preferentially. He limits his nights only to motels/hotels and eats at most fast-food restaurants. The account of his travel is told in an awkward fashion, corrected only when he recalls the Florida leg of his venture–each day is started by an e-mail note for the day, and then reiterated in a slightly more expansive form in his general narrative. Thus, you were constantly reading the same account twice over. Better editing would have eliminated that problem. The final insights that you achieve from such an adventure are somewhat skewed by the odd nature in which he did cross-country bicycle travel. His insights are helpful in telling you what helped make the trip a success, and how the overarching principle was the need for determination to endure in a bicycle saddle for months at a time through the extremes of weather and traffic conditions. His personal style does add to some pleasure to reading his tale, but this book never really gave me the insights was was looking for in deciding whether to perform a similar venture.