I would like to offer up for consideration 'West with the Night' by Beryl Markham.
I really enjoyed it for her adventurous spirit, love of flying and respect for maps and navigation (See quote below). If you read the quote below and read it from the perspective a bike rider following a map across the US, you will gain a lot of respect for those who went before us to create the resources we use so casually...
Here is a short description of Ms. Markam (extracted from a Google search) Aviator, Born: 26 October 1902, Died: 3 August 1986, Birthplace: Leicester, England.
Beryl Markham was the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean from east to west, making the trip on September 4-5, 1936. (Charles Lindbergh made the very first cross-Atlantic solo flight in 1927.) Markham grew up in Kenya; she was the first woman there to receive a commercial pilot's license and became a well-known bush pilot. Markham's memoirs of her life and the Atlantic flight, West With the Night, were published in 1942. The book was republished in 1983.
One of my favorite quotes from the book is:
From CHAPTER XX - Kwaheri Means Farewell - Pg. 218
A map in the hands of a pilot is a testimony of a mans faith in other men; it is a symbol of confidence and trust. It is not like a printed page that bears mere words, ambiguous and artful, and whose most believing reader ... must allow in his mind a recess for doubt.
A map says to you, Read me carefully, follow me closely, doubt me not. It says, I am the earth in the palm of your hand. Without me, you are alone and lost. And indeed you are. Were all the maps in this world destroyed and vanished under the direction of some malevolent hand, each man would be blind again, each city be made a stranger to the next, each landmark become a meaningless signpost pointing to nothing.
Yet looking at it, feeling it, running a finger along its lines, it as a cold thing, a map, humorless and dull, born of calipers and a draughtsmans board. That coastline there, the ragged scrawl of scarlet ink, shows neither sand nor sea nor rock; it speaks of no mariner, blundering full sail in wakeless seas, to bequeath, on sheepskin or a slab of wood, a priceless scribble to prosperity. This brown blot that marks a mountain has, for the casual eye, no other significance, though twenty men, or ten, or only one, may have squandered life to climb it. Here is a valley, there a swamp, and there a desert; and here is a river that some curious and courageous soul, like a pencil in the hand of God, first traced with bleeding feet.
Here is your map. Unfold it, follow it, then throw it away, if you will. It is only paper. It is only paper and ink, but if you think a little, if you pause a moment, you will see that these two things have seldom joined to make a document so modest and yet so full with histories of hope or sagas of conquest.
No map I have ever flown by has ever been lost or thrown away; I have a trunk containing continents. I have the maps I always used en route to England and back...
Enjoy,
Robert
