Around the World on a Bicycle - Volume I: From San Francisco to Teheran

In 1884, a twenty-six-year-old Englishman named Thomas Stevens did something that seemed either brilliant or insane: he climbed onto a fifty-inch high-wheeler bicycle and set out to circle the globe. This is the wildly entertaining account of that journey's first leg, from San Francisco to Tehran, published in 1887 and based on the newspaper articles that made Stevens famous across two continents. Stevens is the perfect traveling companion: sharp-eyed, self-deprecating, and endlessly amused by his own predicament. He battles mud-soaked mountain roads, befriends (and is baffled by) everyone from Nevada prospectors to Persian diplomats, and describes the American West with a freshness that makes it feel both familiar and astonishingly alien. His high-wheeler wheezes through Sierra Nevada passes, rattles across alkali deserts, and carries him into territories where bicycles have never been seen. The prose fizzes with Victorian energy, mixing genuine wonder at the landscape with a wry awareness that he has chosen to do something genuinely absurd. This book endures because it captures a hinge moment in history: the last great age of overland travel before automobiles and planes rewired the world. Stevens pedals into that vanishing landscape with humor and heart, and the result feels less like a museum piece than a lost classic you'd stay up too late reading.