A filmmaker cycling across the United States connects his journey to the first adventuresome high-wheelers, surrealism, film, and philosophy in this charming and artful travel book.

The challenge: to cycle from Disney’s Epcot Center toward San Francisco — a 4350 mile journey — on the cusp of summer. In search of the mythological American West seamlessly represented in movies and literature, Delpeut and his beloved cycling companion instead discover a landscape rarely felt in its actual punishing weather and expanse. On their way through the South, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, the couple encounter a blistering and varied cast of characters. A philosophy emerges as they bicycle their way across America that unites the challenge, wonderment, discovery, and naiveté that brought them along these roads. Woven into their journey is the history of long-distance cycling in America, the 19th-century high-wheeler adventures, H.G. Wells’s Wheels of Chance, the sublime paintings of Mark Rothko, and Alfred Jarry’s parody Supermale about the erotics of the machine age. On the day the author turns forty, the adventure culminates in Las Vegas, the ridiculous exaggeration of Manifest Destiny. But instead of becoming discouraged, he writes in a new introduction that this trip was the seed of a passion that has taken him and his still-beloved all over the world for decades since.

“Delpeut has written a fantastic story, which in its charming combination of style, color, content and depth, can hardly be compared to the average world of the average cyclist.” —The World Cyclist

“Much more than just another travelogue.” —De Volkskrant

“Discussions about the work of Peter Delpeut are dominated by …time. This unstoppable force, which hovers in the background of our daily lives exerting its endless influence on all things, could be considered Delpeut’s professional forte.” –Matthew Cole Levine, Found Footage Magazine

“A thoughtful, quietly ambitious travel memoir that uses cycling as a lens to explore memory, perception, and the changing nature of experience. Rather than focusing on action or adventure, The Long Landscape leans into reflection, asking what it really means to move through the world—especially in an age where even “self-powered” travel is no longer entirely independent. Its strongest quality is the central idea that, despite technological evolution, the essence of cycling remains unchanged. The notion that riding a bicycle today can evoke the same sense of wonder felt by early cyclists—and even be compared to the astonishment of the first cinema audiences—is both original and convincing. It gives the narrative a philosophical backbone.” —Cycloscope