Across America by Motor-Cycle. Cet article n’est pas disponible.Across America by Motor-Cycle

In 1919 a young Englishman bought a second-hand Henderson in New York and rode it to the Pacific, across an America that had almost no roads worth the name.

Charles Kenilworth Shepherd came out of the Royal Flying Corps looking for something to do with himself. He named the machine Lizzie, pointed it west, and spent the summer crossing the continent by way of the Alleghenies, the Dixie Highway, the Santa Fe Trail, the Royal Gorge, New Mexico, the Petrified Forest, the Grand Canyon, and the Mojave Desert. Across America by Motor-Cycle is the account he published in 1922.

Shepherd is dry, self-deprecating, and very funny about punctures, mud, speed traps, and hotel keepers, and beneath the comedy the book is a clear-eyed snapshot of a country at the moment the motor age arrived and the highways had not yet caught up. It has been a favourite among motor cycle travellers ever since, and it stands up as a fine piece of early adventure writing in its own right.

This edition features:

• The complete text of Shepherd's transcontinental ride from New York to San Francisco
• Twenty-one chapters following the route by way of the Dixie Highway and the Santa Fe Trail
• First-hand descriptions of the Royal Gorge, the Grand Canyon, and the crossing of the Mojave Desert
• A candid portrait of American roads, towns, and hospitality in the years after the First World War
• Essential reading for motor cycle travellers and enthusiasts of early road adventure

This book was originally published prior to 1923, and represents a reproduction of an important historical work, maintaining the same format as the original work. While some publishers have opted to apply OCR (optical character recognition) technology to the process, we believe this leads to sub-optimal results (frequent typographical errors, strange characters and confusing formatting) and does not adequately preserve the historical character of the original artifact. We believe this work is culturally important in its original archival form. While we strive to adequately clean and digitally enhance the original work, there are occasionally instances where imperfections such as blurred or missing pages, poor pictures or errant marks may have been introduced due to either the quality of the original work or the scanning process itself. Despite these occasional imperfections, we have brought it back into print as part of our ongoing global book preservation commitment, providing customers with access to the best possible historical reprints. We appreciate your understanding of these occasional imperfections, and sincerely hope you enjoy seeing the book in a format as close as possible to that intended by the original publisher.