Around the World on Two Wheels

This is my upcoming summer read.
Thought I'd share, looks fascinating and very inspiring.
Woman pedal power.
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..."She announced her arrival by sending telegrams or telegraph messages to newspapers and cycling clubs of upcoming towns. Indeed, she exemplified the “New Woman” in the best and worst ways possible."


AROUND THE WORLD IN TWO WHEELS: Annie Londonderry’s Extraordinary Ride, by Peter Zheutlin - - - -
Peter Zheutlin, Annie Londonderry’s great-great nephew, has written a masterful homage to his great-great aunt, while recounting the extraordinary “ride” of a remarkable woman.
Annie Cohen was born in Latvia in around 1870, and moved to Boston as a child. She married Max Kopchovsky in 1888 and had three children in the following four years. In 1894, presumably as part of a wager, she agreed to undertake a bicycle tour around the globe, following the example of Thomas Stevens who had made a similar trip a decade earlier. The details of the wager were either too vague or too detailed, depending on which story Annie decided to tell. Zheutlin even suggests that Annie herself may have invented the whole wager story to both rationalize and to sensationalize her voyage (after, of course, the famous wager of Phileas Fogg in Jules Verne’s 1872 novel, Around the World in 80 Days). According to Annie, the wager allowed her fifteen months to circle the globe and required that she earn her upkeep during the trip. Although not active in the women’s movement, Annie was surely sympathetic to the plight of the “New Woman,” much written about in the papers and the media in general in the 1890’s. As Zheutlin writes: “the bicycle represented to Annie a literal vehicle to the fame, freedom, and material wealth she so craved.”

In Chicago in late September, Annie realized that she would not have enough time to cross the Great Plains and the Rockies to catch her steamship in San Francisco, so she decided to reverse her itinerary by going back to the east coast and taking a boat to Europe.

Annie arrived in Le Havre on December 3, 1894. Although her trip in France started on a negative note: customs officials impounded her bike, her money was stolen and the French reporters wrote repeatedly that she was too muscular to be truly feminine and labeled her as belonging to the category of “neutered beings." Still, Annie claimed that her voyage through France became the highlight of her whole tour. Suffering cold weather and rain, Annie made it from Paris to Marseilles in two weeks, although she took the train for over two hundred kilometers before Lyon. In Marseilles she was given a hero’s welcome and a grand farewell as she sailed to Egypt and beyond.
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