Travels in a Strange State – Cycling Across the U.S.A. –

“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, banks, mortuaries, post offices, dry cleaners, trees, and in Hawaii even  into a volcano. But driving past Josie as she cycled across America was a new and alarming experience. …

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. …”