We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Anne Breedlove a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Anne thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Can you walk us through some of the key steps that allowed you move beyond an idea and actually launch?

First, I took the trips and shared the journey via emails. Many readers suggested I write a book about our experiences. I let the idea marinate for 3 years. Then I attended some short, focused writing classes in San Francisco. During the eighth class I had an “ah-ha” moment and knew what my first book would be about and how I would shape it. The first four chapters flew off my fingers. Took a year to write the next twenty. Two more years to get the book published.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I am the sixth of ten children born and raised in Albany, New York. Visiting San Francisco during a cross-country road trip in 1972, I decided to stay. I worked in the graphics industry for twenty years before I returned to school to study history, eventually getting a Master’s degree, with my thesis published in the California Historical Society’s Quarterly in 2001. I also pursued fine art printmaking and have art in several San Francisco shops and galleries. As a result of a happenstance experience in rural France in 1997, over the next twenty years I traveled with my husband Jim approximately 40,000 miles in twenty-one countries on their two loaded bicycles. I am writing a second book about their first big post-retirement adventure – crossing North America and halfway back in 2008.
My first book, PART-TIME NOMADS is part memoir, part travelogue, and one hundred percent ode to the joy of taking on new challenges no matter your age or life situation. This book focuses on our evolution from weekend cyclists to fully loaded, self-contained international bicycle travelers. Averaging eight miles an hour, they braved rain, snow and back roads, learning hard lessons about inaccurate maps, crazy drivers, dead ends, and extreme weather, all while falling in love with the unpredictable road ahead.
Mile by mile, our endurance and ambition increased, we soon ventured further and further afield. Being together 24/7, attempting things we’d never done before, wasn’t always easy. Many thought we were crazy but loved reading my tales of plunging into icy rivers, singing to ward off bears, and gleaning head lettuce from a harvested field. The people we met – in campgrounds, restaurants, libraries, music festivals, and dive bars – were as memorable and varied as the places we explored.
Animating these stories is the incredible rush of traveling just the two of us – no tour guides or sag wagons – under our own steam, learning that we worked pretty damned well as a team, becoming self-reliant, and reigniting a passion not only for cycling, but also for each other.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

Jim and I really only stumbled on the idea of international bicycle travel, and when we decided to figure out how to do it ourselves we discovered we were a really good match, a good team. We spent 10 years practicing and then decided to retire young (61 and 54) to travel while we still had the bodies to do it. The journeys we went on – cycling 40,000 miles in 21 countries over twenty years – were transformative. I’m on the second in a series of books (as many as ten if I have the time and stamina) detailing the experiences we had, the world we visited, the impact it had on us and those around us. I am also a historian who benefited from the researching the primary sources of past generations, I feel my books tell a historical record that will be there for future generations.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

Four days cycling south from Ulaan Bataar, Mongolia to the Gobi Desert in May 2011 we got stranded in a 38-hour storm that started and Siberia and descended as far as Shanghai, destroying our tent and forcing us to abandon our gear. Eventually we intersected some miners who helped us get out of the storm. Lots more details . . .

Contact Info:

• Website: https://annembreedlove.com
• Instagram: speedyab6
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anne-breedlove-b4225044/

Image Credits

Anne M. Breedlove