March 19, 2024

You & a Bike & a Road

In 2016, Eleanor Davis documented her bike tour and then published part of it as You & a Bike & a Road. Anyone who does a long-distance bike ride will relate to parts of her story: the sore knees, the relentless headwinds, the road-side sights.

Ms. Davis’s journey was a bigger ride than I have ever done. She loaded up her bike in Tuscon, headed home across the southern United States to Athens, Georgia.

Along the way, she discovers, her own strength, helpful strangers, and the weirdness that comes from spending day after day on a bike.

The book itself is a recreation of the illustrations in her journal of the bike ride. You can see when she had good days and optimistic days. The pages are full of detail and motion and story. The bad days are stark and bare.

If you’ve ever done a long bike ride, you will enjoy this book.