Searching for Shade

Book excerpt: This book celebrates the journey in July of 2021 of two experienced motorcycle pals on trikes who crazily decide to ride to Alaska via Canada. They obsessively plan the trip for a year—ten thousand miles in thirty-one days. They joyfully began the ritual of meticulous mapping detail, precise gathering of equipment, and making choice reservations. There is one very dark shadow in all of their meticulousness, the COVID-19 is beginning and growing through 2020. The border between Canada and the United States remained closed and did not open month after month after month. In the eleventh hour, the journey changes, and they make hasty plans to travel nineteen states into the heat of an inferno, forest fires, and homelessness of the southwest of America instead. The trip to the cool confines of Alaska becomes an eight-thousand-mile “search for shade” in the sun-scorched climate crisis of the Southwest.