Book review: two wheels north

[mimitabby]

Two Wheels North: Bicycling the West Coast in 1909 by Evelyn McDaniels Gibb.


It is 1909. Two boys decide that after they graduate from Highschool they are going to ride bicycles to the Seattle World's fair. They live in Santa Rosa California.
A newspaper editor in Seattle hears about it and offers them 25 dollars if they can make the trip.
Their mothers are against it, but they go anyway. They promise to send postcards along the way, so that their local paper can report on their adventures.
They started off armed with a pistol and a hunting rifle, a couple of nice hunting knives, a tire pump, and a lot of food. They even have bottles of some remedies. They have goggles for their eyes, one boy has a "cyclometer" which
is a simple odometer, which he faithfully measures their progress with. They get lost, fall down, narrowly escape trains and get beat up by bandits. They get sick, they tussle with a snake, and eventuallly they are robbed of almost every item of value that they had. But they make it to Seattle. There are wonderfully detailed descriptions of the bikes and the incredible roads they had to travel on.
The author's spunk, determination and opinions are worth reading about. This is a real boy and he turns into a man on this trip.

[pooks]

Thanks for the recommendation. Sounds good.

I met a man who with a friend rode their bikes from Dallas to Chicago in the 1920s. They ended up hitching rides part of the way, but it was amazing to talk to the old guy.