cycling

Starting in Mexico’s fir forests, onward through Nebraska’s cornfields, into southeastern Canada, and looping past Boston and New York City, Sara Dykman rode her bike along a path millions upon millions have circuited before, although she was the first human to do so. In her adventure memoir Bicycling with Butterflies, she writes about tracing the ten-thousand-mile monarch migration route on a rig she built from secondhand parts. Her nine-month trek was filled with bike touring elements any long-distance cyclist will recognize: the generosity of strangers, the bliss of hot showers and ice cream, and a range of campsites from bunkhouses to culverts to soccer fields. Along the way, Dykman brings us into the perspective of the butterflies, and you’ll discover the intricacies of metamorphosis, milkweed varieties, and monarch habitat, as well as the customs of passionate butterfly advocates, or, as Dykman calls them, Crazy Monarch People. Read this book and be transported into the everyday magic of both two-legged and six-legged creatures great and small.

Andrew Pham bicycled across Vietnam twenty years after his family fled the country. The journey is external — heat, roads, food — and internal — identity, memory, belonging. A Vietnamese American returning to a place that's both home and foreign.

Anna Brones's celebration of cycling as a way of life — commuting, touring, culture, and the simple joy of moving through the world on two wheels. Accessible and enthusiastic.

Kate Harris bicycled the Silk Road from Turkey to Tibet, chasing the ghost of Marco Polo and her own childhood dream of exploration. The question at the book's center: is there still anywhere left to explore?

Barbara Savage and her husband bicycled 23,000 miles around the world in the early 1980s. Her account is joyful, harrowing, and heartbreaking — Savage was killed in a cycling accident shortly after the book was completed.

Martijn Doolaard bicycled from Amsterdam to Singapore and photographed the journey. The images are gorgeous — the book is a visual diary of landscapes and encounters across two continents.

It begins with a prophecy, scratched onto a palm leaf by the village astrologer: “He will marry a girl from far, far away…” Born in a hut on the edge of the Indian jungle, PK rises from humble beginnings to become an artist in New Delhi, where he falls in love with a traveling Swedish woman. Lotta matches the prophecy, but when she has to head back home the stars appear stuck just short of alignment. It’s 1976, and plane tickets to Sweden aren’t cheap, so PK sets off on a secondhand Raleigh with no map and little more than a sleeping bag and $80. His journey takes him 7,000 miles over the roads of Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey, and Europe. Cosmic and totally groovy, it’s a profound true story of one man’s passage from wild, rural India to the modern Western world, and how an adventurous mindset knows no boundaries.

Recipes organized around cycling life — food for before, during, and after rides. Brones brings the same Scandinavian-inflected simplicity she brings to everything.

A father-son cycling trip through Italy to find the village their ancestors left. The riding is the vehicle; the family history is the destination.

Brooklyn to the tip of South America by motorcycle — the Pan-American Highway and everything off it. Photography-driven, with the road itself as the organizing principle.

Solo bicycle travel through Asia — dirt roads, language barriers, and the hospitality of strangers. The pavement ends early and the real journey begins.