Breaking the Limit: One Woman's Motorcycle Journey Through North America

by Karen Larsen

Overview

Breaking the Limit is one woman's account of riding her motorcycle from New Jersey to Alaska and back. Realizing that years of work and travel in other people's countries made her a stranger in her own, and with an invitation to meet her biological father for the first time, Karen Larsen set out on a fifteen-thousand-mile trip with nothing but her motorcycle and the barest of essentials.

Larsen's journey tests the limits of her own endurance, challenges her long-held beliefs and values, and asks what it means to belong to a family. Through the the fields of Iowa and the deserts of the Southwest, over the Rockies and across Alaska's Kenai Peninsula, Larsen confronts questions of femininity, family, independence, and personal identity.

Her journey speaks to the immense space and over-whelming beauty of North America, as well as to the diversity and vitality of the people she meets along the way. Breaking the Limit invites you to join her as she braces against the wind, trades security for freedom, sacrifices stability for motion, and opens herself up to the vast canopy of a continent.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780786868704
Publisher:	Grand Central Publishing
Publication date:	07/07/2004
Pages:	384
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x (d)
Age Range:	13 - 18 Years

About the Author

Karen Larsen does development work for nonprofit organizations. She received her master's degree in public administration from Princeton University. She lives in New Jersey.

Read an Excerpt

"Driving a motorcycle is a sensual, visceral, and immediate experience. It's the blast of air parting in an almost physical way around your body. It's the feel of heavy steel machinery between your thighs and knees as you move through turns, running a good road on a clear warm morning. It's the taste of wet grass, deep woods, damp riverbanks, and freshly cut hay that finds its way to the back of your throat. You know and experience what is around you and feel the very sensation of motion itself, in a way that you never can behind the wheel of a car."

Editorial Reviews

This is a deeply personal moment of reckoning with the misconceptions that keep us from functioning at full throttle. Faced with the open road and the unknown, Larsen finds that true connections exist, if one has the courage to look for them.

Kathy Balog