Breaking The Limit: One Woman's Motorcycle Journey Through North America

From Publishers Weekly
Between finishing graduate school and starting a new job, Canadian-born but American-bred Larsen decided it was time for a major motorcycle expedition. She wasn't trying to "find herself"—at 31, she figured she knew herself. Nor was she one of those infamous " 'biker babes,' 'fender bunnies,' or 'biker chicks,' " out looking for guys. She just wanted to see more of America. For Larsen, who fell in love with motorcycles when she was 15, motorcycle touring is the perfect way to experience both scenery and people: she smells the fields, she feels the storms, she meets the curious. Departing from New Jersey in June 2000, Larsen drove her Harley-Davidson 1200 Sportster clear across the continent to Washington State, then north through British Columbia and Alaska—and back. While there was one emotional high point in the trip (meeting her father's family in Canada) and one mildly low point (breaking up with her already uninterested boyfriend over the phone), Larsen is not given to wild mood swings—she mainly describes road conditions, landscape, her campgrounds and her limited contact with people along the way. Buried in the daily details, however, are some inviting questions about the travel experience: why do so many tourists wander into risky situations believing themselves immune to disaster? And why do we believe our chosen mode of travel is more authentic than someone else's, just because it's more arduous? Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


Book Description
A vivid chronicle of discovery based on a solitary motorcycle trip across America. Breaking the Limit is one woman's account of riding her motorcycle from New Jersey to Alaska and back. Realizing that years of work and travel in other people's countries made her a stranger in her own, and with an invitation to meet her biological father for the first time, Karen Larsen set out on a fifteen-thousand-mile trip with nothing but her motorcycle and the barest of essentials. Larsen's journey tests the limits of her own endurance, challenges her long-held beliefs and values, and asks what it means to belong to a family. Through the fields of Iowa and the deserts of the Southwest, over the Rockies and across Alaska's Kenai Peninsula, Larsen confronts questions of femininity, family, independence, and personal identity. Her journey speaks to the immense space and overwhelming beauty of North America, as well as to the diversity and vitality of the people she meets along the way. Breaking the Limit invites you to join her as she braces against the wind, trades security for freedom, sacrifices stability for motion, and opens herself up to the vast canopy of a continent.


About the Author
Karen Larsen does development work for non-profit organizations. She received her master's degree in public administration from Princeton University and lives in New Jersey.


Excerpted from Breaking the Limit: One Woman's Motorcycle Journey Across North America by Karen Larsen. Copyright © 2004. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
"Driving a motorcycle is a sensual, visceral, and immediate experience. It's the blast of air parting in an almost physical way around your body. It's the feel of heavy steel machinery between your thighs and knees as you move through turns, running a good road on a clear warm morning. It's the taste of wet grass, deep woods, damp riverbanks, and freshly cut hay that finds its way to the back of your throat. You know and experience what is around you and feel the very sensation of motion itself, in a way that you never can behind the wheel of a car."


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Between finishing graduate school and starting a new job, Canadian-born but American-bred Larsen decided it was time for a major motorcycle expedition. She wasn't trying to "find herself"-at 31, she figured she knew herself. Nor was she one of those infamous " `biker babes,' `fender bunnies,' or `biker chicks,' " out looking for guys. She just wanted to see more of America. For Larsen, who fell in love with motorcycles when she was 15, motorcycle touring is the perfect way to experience both scenery and people: she smells the fields, she feels the storms, she meets the curious. Departing from New Jersey in June 2000, Larsen drove her Harley-Davidson 1200 Sportster clear across the continent to Washington State, then north through British Columbia and Alaska-and back. While there was one emotional high point in the trip (meeting her father's family in Canada) and one mildly low point (breaking up with her already uninterested boyfriend over the phone), Larsen is not given to wild mood swings-she mainly describes road conditions, landscape, her campgrounds and her limited contact with people along the way. Buried in the daily details, however, are some inviting questions about the travel experience: why do so many tourists wander into risky situations believing themselves immune to disaster? And why do we believe our chosen mode of travel is more authentic than someone else's, just because it's more arduous? Agent, Virginia Barber. (July 7) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.


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