Good Touring Tales

For some people, the love of bicycling brings them to read other riders' memoirs. For others, the vicarious thrill of touring on paper is what brings them to try it in real life. Either way, there's nothing like a good book about traveling by bicycle to inspire vacation planning in the midst of a rainy winter, to remind you of the fundamental joy of self-propelled voyages at a pace that not only allows but forces you to experience the lands you're passing through.

What follows is most definitely not a comprehensive list of bicycle touring books. Instead, it's a listing of books that I, personally, have read and enjoyed. If you see several books on the list that you found insufferably boring, chances are you and I have different literary tastes. If you see several that you've enjoyed, maybe you'll like the rest. Or maybe not.

For convenience, I've linked titles to Amazon.com, though if you have a good local book store I would certainly recommend keeping them in business. Book stores, like bike shops, are part of the soul of a community, usually run by underpaid devotees who find the fastest route to a small fortune is to start business with a large one. Still, Amazon is very fast, has excellent selection, and beats the pants off of chain bookstores in the mall.

For the books that are out of print, you might want to try an on-line used book search engine like Alibris that links the inventories of many used book stores around the world -- if you can't support your local book store, you can at least support someone else's.

I frequently get requests from people to add books to this list. Sometimes authors, sometimes publishers, sometimes enthusiastic readers. But this contains only books that I have read and enjoyed. So if you think I'll like your book, Email me, and if I haven't read it I'll give it a try, I'm always looking for good new books!

The Books, In No Particular Order

• Around the World on a Bicycle by Thomas Stevens. The great-grandaddy of bicycle touring books, both interesting and entertaining if you can get past the author's character. Thomas Stevens was a man of his times, and his book shows it -- he shoots vicious goslings for fun, derides foreign cultures, indulges in racial and ethnic stereotypes, etc.

  On the other hand, he rode across the United States, and then around the world, on a pennyfarthing, beginning in 1884. And he wrote about it in quite literate, perhaps even purple, prose. You don't have to agree with his views of others to enjoy the saga of his travels, any more than you have to approve of plunder and pillage to enjoy stories of Vikings or pirates.

  The current edition is missing two pages at the start of Volume II. I was lucky enough to receive a copy of these missing pages from Gary Young, and I've typed them in as HTML, which you can find here.

• Two Wheels North: Bicycling the West Coast in 1909 by Victor McDaniel, Ray Francisco, and Evelyn McDaniel Gibb. Two decades after Thomas Stevens, bicycle travel was still a risky endeavor, and hardly what most parents would want their teenage sons to attempt. Yet that's just what McDaniel and Francisco did, bicycling from California to the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition in Seattle. Despite injuries that would send most modern tourists to the ER and then back home, and without enough money to take the train home if their ride failed, these two boys grew up on that ride, seeing more in one summer than most people do in a lifetime. It surely puts today's paved Pacific Coast Route in a different light.

  As a third-generation Vashon Island resident, I first bought this book because of its local connections, Victor McDaniel and Evelyn McDaniel Gibb having been fellow islanders. But it's now one of my favorite recommendations for anyone looking for more adventurous touring stories.

• Miles from Nowhere: A Round the World Bicycle Adventure by Barbara Savage. Inspired by the idea of bicycle touring but with no experience, a young couple decide to put their professional lives on hold, their belongings in storage, and take off around the world. Too busy to even test ride their 10-speed bikes with touring gear, they never rode their bikes with panniers until the day they started their tour, grossly overloaded but charged with enthusiasm that sees them through two years.

  Sadly, having survived the hazards of two years of touring in chaotic third-world traffic, Barbara Savage was killed by a motorist in Santa Barbara shortly after returning home.

• Full Tilt: Ireland to India With a Bicycle by Dervla Murphy. Dervla Murphy is not your average woman by any means. Eschewing fragile derailleur bikes for a trusty roadster, packing a pistol for security (and she needed it), she set off in the mid-1960s to ride from her home in Ireland to visit India. Never put off by even the most hostile encounters, she has a series of adventures that must be more enjoyable to read than to have endured.

  After this book she wrote a number of other good travel tales, wandering through Transylvania, Madagascar, South Africa, southern India, Nepal, and more.

• Where the Pavement Ends: One Woman's Bicycle Trip Through Mongolia, China, and Vietnam by Erika Warmbrunn. Published by The Mountaineers, and winner of their coveted Barbara Savage/Miles from Nowhere Memorial Award, this chronicle follows eight months of riding far from the usual tourist destinations. Unlike the Savages, Erika Warmbrunn travels solo, yet her stories clearly dispel the image of solo touring as lonely, showing instead how easily the solo tourist can join the society of any village she lands in.

• Off the Map : Bicycling Across Siberia by Mark Jenkins. Unfortunately out of print, this is a well written account of the cultural and emotional as well as physical journey of a small group cycling through the then-potent Soviet Union, from Vladivostok to Leningrad. Avoiding the worst American stereotypes of the Soviet era, the author brings to life the remote regions he passed through, including nearly a thousand interminable miles of mostly walking through western Siberia, where there simply were no roads through the swamp, only the railroad bed, too rough to ride on.

• Spokesongs: Bicycle Adventures on Three Continents by Willie Wier. Listening to KUOW one afternoon several years ago, I heard an announcer reading from a letter home from a Seattle-area cyclist who was touring in India. The letter was wonderful, bringing to life the culture I'd known when I lived in India as an exchange student. The station mentioned this was one of a series of letters they would be reading from Willie Wier. I was hooked.

  The letters from that trip were followed by reports from two more trips, now collected in an excellent, entertaining book. Willie Wier is now a cycling columnist, he's been on the speaking circuit, and he still finds time to talk to KUOW from time to time -- see more at http://www.willieweir.com/

  I will caution those of you who lend books to friends, this is one you will not get back -- I have now lost two copies because people felt the need to pass it on to another reader who was supposed to give it back to me but kept passing it on instead.

• Metal Cowboy: Tales from the Road Less Pedaled by Joe Kurmaskie. Not a report of any one ride, this series of vignettes covers years of backroads touring, funny and frightening incidents, character sketches of people met on the road, etc.

  If you've read Joe's writings on the bicycle touring list, or the few times Buycicling magazine actually let him write instead of spit out snippets, then this book's tone will be quite familiar. And if you ever get a chance to meet Joe in person, then buy him a cold one, sit back, and listen.

• The Lead Goat Veered Off : A Bicycling Adventure on Sardinia , by Neil Anderson, published by Cycle Logic Press. Canada's answer to Willie Wier and Joe Kurmaskie, Neil Anderson combines beautiful rides with social commentary, capturing the soul of touring -- meeting the culture whose home you're riding through. The tale ranges from serious cycling to anecdotes too improbable to be made up. Cycle Logic, Anderson's own publishing outfit set up to get the story in print, also includes more book links and an excellent touring photo gallery.

• A Crossing: A Cyclist's Journey Home, by Brian Newhouse. An interesting and unsettling tale of a man disconnected from himself, his family, and the woman he loves, who sets out on a solo cross-country bicycle tour to find himself. He takes the solo part seriously, avoiding people who would want to ride with him, all the while struggling with personal and religious questions that he can never quite settle.

  Far less cycling detail than most of the cycling books I've mentioned, but still a fascinating story of one man's life-changing bicycle journey.

• Ride With the Wind by Charlotte Hamlin. This is not your average touring tale, it doesn't have much in the way of bicycle specifics or details of the route. Instead, it's the tale of an Adventist nurse and grandmother who rode across the U.S. to promote her vegetarian, healthy-living lifestyle, and who enjoyed her trip so much that she flew to Europe and turned it into a round-the-world tour.

  She makes all sorts of novice errors, rides on Interstates and Autobahns that aren't open to cyclists, loses touch with her support vehicle constantly, and barely understands how a bicycle works. So why do I like the book anyway? Just her relentlessly good humor and positive attitude in the face of all her mishaps and misadventures. And her demonstration, time and again, that most people are more than willing to assist a helpless stranger who isn't isolated inside a steel and glass cage.

  A bit preachy in places, in both religion and lifestyle, but frankly I don't mind opinionated grannies with the energy to ride around the world.

This page written by Josh Putnam. Please feel free to email questions, comments, corrections, suggestions, etc.

Josh Putnam's Home Page | Bike Page | Framebuilding Page | Photo Page