Even though I have no interest in biking a long distance (or any distance for that matter!), I enjoy reading about challenging trips, especially bicycle journeys. This one was especially appealing since I’m familiar with all the coastal areas from Oregon to California. I loved it when he was describing the journey and experiences on the road, but the digressions to other parts of his life and the history lessons got a little distracting. At the risk of sounding shallow, he made a few errors in location names at the beginning of the book, such as going to Mt. Hood and visiting the “Stanley Hotel.” While he is correct in saying it was featured in the movie The Shining (the exterior anyway), the Mt Hood hotel is actually Timberline Lodge; the Stanley Hotel is in Colorado. Then in Portland, he said they went to “Jack’s Grill,” which should have been “Jake’s Grill.” Too picky? You make the call…

All in all, it was a fast read, and the author has an appealing style of writing, but if I were to recommend a book about bicycling the West Coast, I would recommend Jedidiah Jenkins’s To Shake the Sleeping Self and Barbara Savage’s story of her worldwide bicycle journey, Miles from Nowhere. For a bike journey from the POV of a middle-aged man, Bruce Weber’s Life is a Wheel is excellent.