Great story cross post from touring
 

I was so impressed with this story I thought many commuters would enjoy it too. I commute, tour, and love American history so I thought it was a great stroy, And it's all online

The Lure of the Open Road.
Wartime wandering through the Eastern states by bicycle, truck, and riverboat. 1944.
by Thelma Popp Jones. 2007.

http://mjgradziel.com/thelmajones/lureoftheopenroad.html

link fixed

Trees were sparse, but when we did find one along the road, we took advantage of its shade and the tall grasses below. That was meant to be a short relaxation, but it turned out to be a long nap there by the side of the road. How much a part of the earth we were then! How independent of people and all their accessories. No one else would stop beneath this tree and see it as we did. Oh yes, they would drive by at fifty miles an hour and say, "We have seen it." But in their rush they would have missed the stoney silence of a scene filled with nothing but earth and sky. They would have missed the unmistakable fragrance of a breeze wafting over acres of growing things and the color of wheat under the shadow of a passing cloud.

This was the time we realized that our method of travel was the best. Under our slow pedaling, nothing escaped us, from the change of the pavement at the county lines to the gradual change of the speech dialect from North to South.

Well the link didn't work, but frankly from the description... Yeah, seeing the world at say 15MPH vrs 50MPH makes all the difference in the world.

From tours I've done, where small things made big impressions and my mind had time to roll those things around a bit at the slow stately speed of a cyclist... to even things I see and notice daily, from the smells of cooking in local homes to the transformer that I called into the power company because "it smelled funny," all these things are foreign to those zipping by in their closed boxes.

Sounds very similar to the writing of Kerouac and the other beat writers of the late 40's and 50's.

Really liked this story. Here is the link for copy and paste. The ellipses messed your original up.

http://mjgradziel.com/thelmajones/lu...eopenroad.html

Link fixed.