It's heavy on the negatives -- the difficulties, illnesses, struggles, hostile people, bad food, with almost parenthetic mentions of beauty, friendliness, special tasty foods. But I've been a motorcyclist in a prior life and I know that you don't sit around the campfire talking about the smooth straight roads ridden on sunny days -- what we remember are the driving thunderstorms we rode through, the winds that nearly blew us off the road, the flat tire 20 miles outside of Albuquerque, the tornado we chased into Washington DC . . . nobody really wants to READ about "what a sunny, beautiful day, what friendly helpful people, what a clean hotel, what a lovely chicken dinner, what great roads where everyone is polite -- this book is a book of struggle and success.

No matter how difficult things became (and at times I have no idea how Nancy found the strength to go on) they kept going, and got where they were trying to go, sometimes with a lot of delay and effort, but they DID IT. I'm not sure how to convey that in a title. "Celebrating the Bumps in the Road"?

This is not a book of beauty -- it's a book of triumph and perseverance, overcoming tremendous adversity at times. They sought out the roads less traveled, and had little idea of what they would find there, but they WENT because they had decided to go. Somehow that's what needs to be conveyed in the title -- the unexpectedness, the unpreparedness, the "totally not in Kansas , Toto" feeling of the whole thing.