In 2023, British journalist Simon Parker bicycled across the United States. This was no holiday joy ride; Parker pedaled for 10 weeks, crossing the country diagonally from Washington State to the Florida Keys. Parker wanted to experience the U.S. up-close, especially its overlooked heartland. His journey was an obstacle course of snarled traffic, fast food dinners, quirky strangers, and ragged motels. Along the way, Parker rode through a hailstorm and patched his inner tube with duct tape. He fought off stray dogs with a club and declined many offers of hard drugs. These travails resulted in a book, “A Ride Across America: A 4,000-Mile Adventure Through the Small Towns and Big Issues of the U.S.A.,” released tin 2024.
Yet “Ride” is more than a travelogue, or even the “adventure” promised in its subtitle. Parker stopped to interview hundreds of people, and nearly all of these interactions were spontaneous. Parker would encounter strangers, in a parking lot or local bar, and ask them questions about the political climate in the United States, among a myriad of other hot-button topics. He asked about Trump and Biden, climate change, and gun control. He asked about taxes, sprawl, race relations, substance abuse, and the relative size of automobiles. The book is packed with man-on-the-street testimony, from farmers to business owners to unhoused people staggering to their next shelter. “A Ride Across America” is Studs Terkel by way of endurance sport.
The hardcover hit bookstores in July 2024, and not by accident. Parker and his London-based publisher wanted the book’s release to coincide with U.S. elections, reflecting the political fever-pitch of those final months. For readers on both sides of the pond, “Ride” sought to describe a deeply divided country, using the words and images of ordinary people, most of them rural. Whatever happened in November, Parker’s reportage would help explain what this cross-section of Americans had been thinking the year before. The bike tour might be a gimmick, playing to the travel writer’s obsessions, but riding down motorways at 12 miles per hour added a physical dimension to his writing as well: road quality, community layout, and unseasonable temperatures all enrich Parker’s descriptions. This book is more than a collection of prescient quotes; it describes the ground people walk.
Two years later, the events of “A Ride Across America” already feel like a distant mirror. Parker rolled into Key West on October 23, 2023, marking the end of his 4,373-mile trek. President Biden was still running for re-election. Nikki Haley was still a credible dark horse candidate. The most recent Israel-Hamas conflict had just begun two weeks earlier. J.D. Vance would not become Trump’s running-mate for another eight months. Like any writer, Parker was describing his time, not knowing what would become important only a few ticks down the timeline. “Ride” might seem, to readers living in the realities of 2026, like a curiosity, already irrelevant.
I disagree. If anything, Parker’s book is more important now than ever, and its value will only grow, as world events march on. The book has frozen an era, a critical moment in U.S. history. Future readers can see “Ride” as a kind of baseline, describing Middle America on the cusp of Trump’s second term. Whatever happens between now and 2028, we can always flip through these unchanging pages and revisit what ordinary life was like, way back in 2023, before the cataclysm.
***
I first encountered Simon Parker through his BBC travel series, “Earth Cycle,” for which the English-born adventurer bicycled 2,000 miles through Scandinavia, much of it on camera. Parker comes off as serious, amicable, and good-humored; he is built for this kind of expedition, chatting up locals and camping in grassy patches. I soon learned more about this globe-trotting freelance journalist, who seemed to pop up everywhere, publishing mostly for the newspaper The Telegraph. His stories were wide-ranging, from organic Icelandic eateries to over-tourism in New Zealand to the best places to honeymoon in Zimbabwe. Simon turned any encounter or activity into a prescient feature, and that was only his day job. Longer expeditions included sailing (as a crewman) across the Pacific Ocean and paragliding in the Andes Mountains.
My interest in Parker is partly aspirational: I am also a freelance writer who specializes in travel and the outdoors, especially cycling. I share the same diehard love for exploring unfamiliar places on two wheels and then writing about the experience. Parker’s publication history and range of movement are objectively more impressive than mine, but we are cut from the same eccentric cloth.
We have also faced similar pitfalls. COVID might easily have destroyed Parker’s career; what does a travel writer even do during lockdown? Write a book, it turns out. Parker’s first effort was “Riding Out: A Journey of Love, Loss and New Beginnings,” about his 3,500-mile bike ride along the coastal outline of Great Britain. It demonstrated, once again, Parker’s editorial adaptability; the jet-setting adventurer couldn’t jet-set, so he rode around the nation of his birth and composed a 320-page travelogue about it. Yet “Riding Out” is striking because of Parker’s confessional approach: He dedicates multiple chapters to his childhood anxiety, bouts of depression, and the tragic loss of close friends. While many authors – especially British travel writers – tend to cushion their experiences with humor, Parker leaned into his personal crisis, which paralleled the health crisis taking place all around. “Riding Out” feels as much memoir as travelogue; Parker bares his soul about isolation and financial fears, then transports himself, alone, as far as pandemic-era policy will allow.
This was how I met Simon Parker, over Zoom, in 2023. The book had recently hit stores, and I interviewed Parker for a profile in Momentum Magazine. His fortunes had clearly improved; Parker joined the call from South Africa, where he was researching new stories, and he responded to my questions with practiced ease. This man was not the self-doubting bundle of nerves he had described in the book; he spoke like a seasoned field reporter and public speaker. And, of course, a formidable athlete who had already crossed entire continents by bike.
“A bicycle is like medicine,” Parker told me. “Spending hours on a bicycle, turning the wheels, concentrating on the road, trying to remain as mindful as possible, I really came to see my bike as a therapist. There is something very soothing about moving at the pace of a bicycle.”
*
Yet, “A Ride Across America” was something different. The working title was “Fractured States,” a pun that no doubt anticipated the polarized perspectives he would encounter. Parker opens the book with an anecdote about his previous ride across the U.S., a 2016 west-to-east transect more devoted to speed than sightseeing. Here he recounts the story of a man who tried to host him, a crack-smoking racist who pummeled Parker with questions and off-color proclamations. Horrified but inspired, Parker started to dream up a second cross-country ride, this one slower and more immersive. The upcoming election would set the stage for strong opinions on every topic imaginable.
The book is a blow-by-blow reckoning of his days, from the moment he wakes up in a dodgy motel to the last beer he drinks before bed, with detailed anecdotes in between. He plumbs each chance meeting and snippet of dialogue for broader meaning. He notes the imposing signs and fences: “As a Briton, I am used to the joys of public right of way… In the United States, though, the concept of private property seemed hardwired with what it meant to be an American.” Hearing about divorce and hardscrabble childhoods, Parker ponders family dynamics: “Approximately 35 percent of American adolescents live without one of their parents.” After a pickup truck nearly runs him down, Parker observes: “American drivers are the seventh worst in the world… By this point in the journey, I had already seen hundreds of people driving while texting – way beyond anything I’d witnessed elsewhere.”
Some readers may find this cycle tedious, as Parker never dwells on any given situation or subject. He flitters from one scene to the next, punctuating each with interview quotes or pithy summations. To me, Parker’s style matches the tempo of bike-touring: A cyclist sees, hears, and smells everything, but only for fleeting moments. This kind of travel is distractible by nature.
Binding the book together is its political tension, and this atmosphere sets the book apart from the author’s other journalism. Parker isn’t known for writing “about politics” so much as writing about subjects steeped in political context. He is not the type to holler questions through a crowd on the steps of Parliament, but he will absolutely embed himself in Colombian slums or under-stocked Venezuelan supermarkets and ask locals what they think about their circumstances. Still, Parker appears to have upped the ante with “Ride”; he converses with working class Americans in far-flung towns about carbon emissions and race relations, crime rates, and the opioid crisis. Hundreds of people open up to him, and Parker credits his outsider status – and unusual transport – as magnets for honest dialogue.
Parker’s own perspective bleeds through, even as he attempts to hear everyone out, and his politics are familiar to me: He’s an avowed atheist, he worries about climate change, and he balks at the (constant) suggestion that he should carry a firearm on his recreational bike ride. Parker visits Tulsa, Oklahoma, and recounts the 1921 race massacre that took place there. He gives two shirts and cash to an unhoused woman by the side of the highway, whom a store clerk later dismisses as a “most likely just a druggie.” Recounting his interactions, Parker shows empathy to everyone, even people he clearly disagrees with, but most of his time is spent in historic Red States, where local perceptions are most likely to contrast with his own.
The most dramatic moment happens near the end, when Simon interviews the owner of a Florida gun shop. The man opines predictably about the Second Amendment, but Parker, who has never owned a firearm, finds himself agreeing.
“In a hypothetical world in which I needed to live with my young family in America, then I too would buy a gun,” writes Parker. “Not out of choice, but a perceived feeling of necessity… That conclusion shocked me to the core. It made me question the alignment of my entire moral compass and sense of self. America, for all its joy and magnificence, had left me feeling more unsafe and on edge than any other country on earth.”
This is the passage that will haunt me for years to come, a canary in our sociological coal mine. The nation Parker rode through in 2023 no longer exists. No chapter in the book references rampant ICE raids, aerial attacks on Venezuelan watercraft, or the architectural dismemberment of the White House. All of that would come later, no doubt shocking many of the people Parker interviewed. As I write this, the Mass Shooting Tracker has logged more than 1,200 such assaults since Parker completed his trip, resulting in about 1,300 deaths. The disastrous meeting between Trump and Zelensky was far off, as was the president’s promise to replace Palestine with a “Gaza Riviera.” Tens of thousands of government employees had not yet been fired by DOGE. Public media hadn’t yet been gutted. Flowers still bloomed in the Rose Garden. The “edgy” and “unsafe” landscape of Parker’s narrative already looks quaint in hindsight.
“A Ride Across America” wasn’t a bestseller in the U.S., and Parker has already moved on to other projects. But I’ll be curious to reread it in a few years, presumably after many geopolitical heartbreaks. Like “Goodbye to Berlin,” Christopher Isherwood’s 1939 portrait of Weimar Germany, Parker’s book serves as an unsettling prologue to the nihilistic chapter we are currently living out. His observations will have much to teach us about how we got here – assuming all the copies haven’t been burned by then.
