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Editorial Review Product Description
From the author of the highly acclaimed "The Wind In My Wheels" comes an extraordinary look at the United States of America. 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, theatres, banks, mortuaries, post offices, dry cleaners, trees, and in Hawaii even into a volcano. But driving past Josie as she cycled across the breadth of the United States was a new and alarming experience. Not that everyone drove straight past. Some stopped to flash at her; others nearly ran her over; a gang of Hell's Angels waved merrily at her - and a great many people stopped, smiled, and asked her to stay with them. And everyone told her to have a nice day - mostly out of habit, partly because they suspected it would be her last. For this is the country where 135,000 children bring their guns to school every day, where murder, like McDonald's is part of everyday life, and where lone female cyclists are easy prey. But it is also a country of boundless hospitality, of huge meals and huge people, and of infinite variety.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. A personal memoir of an improbable journey, it reveals the United States as it is rarely seen - from the seat of a bicycle. ... Read more Customer Reviews (12) 
Entertaining view of life on a bike in the USA
Like all Josie's books, it's funny, well written and entertaining.Keeps you turning the pages.If you're considering biking in the USA - read this first!
Travels in Hawaii and Other States
Josie Dew's books about her travels around the world on her bicycle remind me a little of Dervla Murphy's narratives, but Dew wears her politics a bit more lightly than Murphy. Traveling close to the ground, as Rick Steves would say, allows the cyclist to observe social conditions at close range, while the long stretches of road leave plenty of time to ponder what it all means.
In Travels in a Strange State, Dew flies into Oakland and sets out to cycle down the coast into Mexico. After a few days in the Bay Area, she considers traveling up the coast into Alaska instead. Eventually she heads south, stops in Los Angeles for a few weeks, then impulsively decides to fly to Hawaii. This turns out to be the best decision of the trip, because she falls in love with Hawaii.
In fact, by the time we're halfway through the book, she's still in Hawaii, the smallest state in the union. She still has the rest of the country to get to if she's going to write about traveling across the States.
She finally makes her way back to Los Angeles and from there it's on to Las Vegas. If you've ever driven from L.A. to Las Vegas, you know what a desolate stretch it is. I can't imagine bicycling it, but Josie does it, in 100 degree temperatures and air so dry she has to stop regularly to tend to nosebleeds.
From Las Vegas, she charges on through Utah, Colorado, Kansas, and Missouri. Although this takes weeks of actual time, it goes pretty fast in the book. One stretch of mid-western highway is much like another, as anyone who's driven cross country knows. It isn't until Dew stops in Illinois to meet up with her mother who has flown in from England, that the narrative picks up the pace again.
Staying with American relatives allows Dew to see a more middle class side of America than she normally gets to meet on the road. Bicycling along open highway brings her into contact with any number of homeless people, truckers, hitchhikers, and youth hostelers from other countries. The suburbs of Illinois give her a different perspective.
Josie Dew writes about the people she meets and the sights she sees, and she shares a bit of the history of the places she finds herself. Listening to the radio at night as she falls asleep in her tent adds to her collection of local color.
I've read many travel narratives of exotic lands I will probably never see, but reading Dew's account of her travels in the country I've spent most of my life in gave me a look at America from an unusual and not very attractive angle. It was a little like looking in a three-way mirror and finding out what you look like from the back. Yes, your butt is that big.
Travels in a Strange State
Having been a fan of Josie Dew since reading "Wind in my Wheels", and "The Sun in My Eyes",I was very disappointed with "Travels in a Strange State". I guess the first clue was "24,000 Murders in the United States."On page 1 paragraph 1.This is the start of a constant stream of murders, rapes, drunks and loitering perverts.She goes to 2 of the biggest tourist traps in the US, Hawaii and Los Angeles, and complains of the tourists.It takes her 173 of the 263 pages to get out of California.And then she streaks from Las Vegas to Halifax in the last 100 pages.In her eyes there is a murderer or pervert behind every bush just waiting for her.She dedicatesa page and a half to a masturbator (alleged)and only 2 paragraphs to cross the beautiful countryside of Missouri.How did I cycle 8500 miles across and around the U.S. last year (2007) and not have one encounter with any of these scumbags.And her researcher needs to check out his/her fat facts for the U.S."3 million over 600 pounds"(page 36).I don't think so.Very disappointing.
Travels in a strange state
Expecting another light-hearted rollicking bike adventure about Josies travels in the USA, I must say I was dissapointed by her continually noting the Negative. I have travelled much of the same areas but do not choose to dwell on the seamier and moribund aspects of life. I also felt like she was rushing to finish this book with hardly a mention of the last few thousand miles. I did appreciate her cute maps and drawings throughout the book.
plenty of fizz but wheres the soda
the intrepid Josie Dew is back on her bike again.this time its coast to coast via a straight line right through the heart of the good old u.s.ofa.I cant wait until she comes to Australia so she can tell the world how sunny the continent is,how friendly the people are and how much like the rest of Europe we turned out to be.
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