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.