This Was at a Time

With an adventuresome spirit and minimal preparation, a young woman shares her story of departing from Oklahoma on her bicycle with three men, heading toward the state of New York. Her high school sweetheart studies paper maps and helps guide the crew on rural roads. They carry their own supplies and endure the springtime thunderstorms. As the sun begins to set, they start looking for places to bed down, such as church lawns, strangers' acreages, and old barns. The journey takes place at a time when folks answered their landline telephones, wrote handwritten letters, received their news from three television stations, and sang the same popular songs on radio stations nationwide. The glory, the pain, the beauty, the agony, the people, the conversations, and the love are all shared. The narrative is autobiographical, historical, inspirational, and heartwarming.