Review: "Pilgrim Wheels" by Neil Hanson

Pilgrim Wheels by Neil Hanson
Published 2015 via High Prairie Press
★★★

Let's set the scene: It's March of 2015. I'm weeks away from quitting my job and flying on a one-way ticket to Spain to walk the Camino de Santiago. I've read almost every book about the Camino that I can find and have moved on to looking for more general books about pilgrimage. I'm also desperate for adventure and for books about adventure, and a book about someone cycling across the US fits the bill.

Fast-forward a decade. I'm slightly less desperate for adventure...but Pilgrim Wheels is still on my to-read list, and I've finally gotten my hands on a copy.

I'll cut to the chase: This wasn't the book for me. It's pretty short (more on that in a moment), so it was a fast read. It's more interesting to read about a journey when there's an inner journey as well as an outer journey, though, and to me this felt mostly about the outer journey. A bit repetitious (lots of commentary about hills, wind, highway vs. smaller roads). There's a fair amount of ruminating and riffing on various subjects, but mostly the thoughts felt relatively surface level. Also on the surface level: discussion of how attractive various women are (over and over and over again), including once a promise to the reader that one particular woman who stopped to make sure Hanson and his friend were okay wasn't flirting (I don't think any female readers needed that assurance, but maybe the target reader is a man). It got...pretty tedious.

One of the things Hanson ruminates on is how the experience of traveling is different when you're on a bicycle (or on foot, or sometimes on a motorcycle) than it is from an air-conditioned car (...or a scooter with car support). He tries quite hard not to be judgemental about it, or at least to check his default judgement and look at it from a different perspective. It comes up a lot, though, so I ended up with the sense that he kind of had to push himself to the different perspective. Even this comment about what people are eating: The early risers in town stop by to pick up their coffee and donuts as Dave and I wolf down liquid and calories (loc. 2388).

I find this phrasing so accidentally fascinating. It's not the first (or the last) time that Hanson refers to eating as "liquid and calories" (liquid: 7 mentions, one of which is unrelated to food; fluid: 7 mentions; calories: 28 mentions, almost all of which are in the context of "gather[ing] calories at the convenience store", etc.). Maybe he's not a foodie (fair, neither am I), and I understand the necessity of just taking in huge amounts of both...calories and liquids...when you're on this sort of adventure, which just requires a lot of energy. But of course those early risers he mentions are also fueling themselves, even if their caloric needs for the day are different. Am I overthinking this? 100% yes. But here we are.

Anyway. I either forgot (likely, as it's been ten years) or never noticed that this is only part 1 of the story—the second half of Hanson's journey is covered in a second book. So although the Kindle version of this is under 200 pages, part 2 is almost 300 pages, making the whole story almost 500. I don't plan to pick up part 2 anytime soon, and that's fine (I sort of just wanted to check off a book that has been on my TBR for a decade!), but I think I might have enjoyed this a bit more if the two books had been tightened into one ~300-page book.