Travels in a Strange State

This is the story of the author's eight month cycle ride across America. She experienced racial disharmony in Los Angeles during the riots; heat exhaustion in Death Valley; in Hawaii she cycled up the world's largest dormant volcano; and she also pedalled through the canyons of Utah and Arizona.

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From the author of the highly acclaimed "The Wind In My Wheels" comes an extraordinary look at the United States of America. By most people's standards, Josie Dew is hugely adventurous. By American standards, she is completely insane. For Americans drive everywhere: they can drive through cinemas, restaurants, theatres, banks, mortuaries, post offices, dry cleaners, trees, and in Hawaii even into a volcano. But driving past Josie as she cycled across the breadth of the United States was a new and alarming experience. Not that everyone drove straight past. Some stopped to flash at her; others nearly ran her over; a gang of Hell's Angels waved merrily at her - and a great many people stopped, smiled, and asked her to stay with them. And everyone told her to have a nice day - mostly out of habit, partly because they suspected it would be her last. For this is the country where 135,000 children bring their guns to school every day, where murder, like McDonald's is part of everyday life, and where lone female cyclists are easy prey. But it is also a country of boundless hospitality, of huge meals and huge people, and of infinite variety.
On her eight-month journey Josie experienced it all: in California she saw racial disharmony first hand during the Los Angeles riots; in Death Valley she nearly expired from the heat; in Hawaii she cycled up the world's largest dormant volcano, avoided the Sexual Tantric Seminars of the '60s flower children, saw wili-wili trees, hump-back whales and the Phallic Rock. She pedalled through the canyons of Utah and Arizona, into places called Devil's Hole Hills, Squaw Tit and Zzyzx, across the never-ending prairies of the Mid-West during the worst summer storms for a century and, finally, to the Canadian border and the staggering beauty of the Great Lakes. A personal memoir of an improbable journey, it reveals the United States as it is rarely seen - from the seat of a bicycle.