Two Wheels North: Cycling the West Coast in 1909

Two Wheels North is a wonderful book, rich in the drama, friendship and adventure that made up the trip two teenage boys made on bicycles in the year 1909, leaving from Santa Rosa, CA, and heading into the unknown wilds to venture north to the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition held that year in Seattle, Washington. With the town newspaper and locals cheering them on, the boys left town the morning of August 9th, 1909 with $5.65 between them, on a trip of 54 days, having little understanding of just how much that journey would change them. The writing is splendid; a kind of mix between Jack London and (Nelle) Harper Lee, its sense of exploration and historic dialog remaining colorful and descriptive. The story is told in the voice of Vic McDaniel, one of the riders, through the inimitable understanding and prosaic style of his daughter, Evelyn Gibb. Gibb had listened to her father's stories of the ride when younger with the detached disinterest typical of youth. It wasn't until later in life, when living next door to her aging father and listening again as he recounted the tales that Evelyn understood the impact the trip had on her father. The gleam she saw in his eyes when he told of the junket bespoke a cherished quality the stories held for him which she hadn't noticed before. Intuitively, she decided to chronicle the adventure. In her folksy way she captures the wonder and innocence of two young men, more brothers than friends, living in a time when strangers seeing you pass their farm asked if you were hungry, when even children knew that gum tree groves were planted as windbreaks, and hard work was all you needed to get by. She weaves an interesting tapestry of the events that, when combined, created men from the boys who left Santa Rosa on that long-ago odyssey. Reading the descriptions of their trek north, one is reminded of a different time; a different America. Bittersweet in its rendering of emotions, humanity and nature on a canvas that is 1909 California, it leaves the reader reminiscing about his own youth, the wonder of the unknown and the sense of adventure that technology has modernized so much. Evelyn Gibb is an excellent writer. Her award winning stories have been in "Chicken Soup for the Soul" books as well as many others. She tells her father's tale with a love and empathy of understanding only available to kin, and does so with a master's touch, able to speak in the vernacular of the time so as to bring us to the very glass of a window to the past.

I bought this book thinking it would be an interesting adventure tale. It is that but so much more. The writing is poetic and heart warming. An absolutely wonderful little book!!

If you enjoy reading about cycling and living this is a great book. I've read every touring and cycling book you can imagine, but this is the best! It really gives you a new perspective on how we ride today when you look at what these two boys had to endure at the turn of the century when roads did not exists as we know today. A truly well written adventure, great venacular dialogue, credible and yet an incredible story.

I first bought the book because of its Vashon Island connection, being a lifelong islander myself. But I quickly decided it's one of the best bicycle touring stories in my library -- the boys come alive in the writing, no dreary list of statistics and mileposts, just two boys becoming men on their ride north to Seattle. Puts a whole new perspective on that ride for anyone who has cycled the Pacific Coast route in modern times.

This book is an amazingly well-written story of the adventures of two young men bicycling from Santa Rosa, California to the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition in Seattle in 1909. You are drawn into the narrative until, before you know it, you find yourself riding along with them on their trip, tasting the dust, feeling their occasional pain, and even enjoying a piece of pie with them... and then you realize that, like an Ansel Adams photograph, you have been drawn into an illusion of a reality long past. And, smiling, you dive back into the book and continue pedaling.