Your Mileage May Vary A Memoir by Kristine Goad

"Discover the frontier within yourself." "Fulfill your promise." Who could resist such bold commands blasting out of a full two-page spread in the newspaper? Kristine Goad couldn’t. Despite the fact that she was an overweight twenty-eight year-old with asthma who did not own a bike, the giant ad convinced her to sign up for the GTE Big Ride Across America—a 3,254-mile bicycle journey from Seattle to Washington, D.C. to benefit the American Lung Association. Nine months later, Kristine was among the 730 cyclists amassed at the foot of the Seattle Space Needle to embark on the journey of a lifetime and the largest cross-country bike event in U.S. history. Your Mileage May Vary is this novice cyclist’s account of a summer spent crossing a continent—sometimes on a bike, sometimes on foot, and sometimes in a support vehicle—in search of an experience that would teach her something valuable about herself, her purpose, and her path forward. Filled with details of the towns, prairies, and mountain ridges these cyclists encountered, Your Mileage May Vary is more than just a travelogue. It is an honest, humorous, and sometimes frustrating meditation on the struggle for self-definition and the pursuit of a meaningful life.