Lois on the Loose: One Woman, One Motorcycle, 20,000 Miles Across the Americas

by Lois Pryce

Overview

Lois Pryce was working at the BBC in London, firmly set on the career track. But unbeknownst to her coworkers, Lois was leading a parallel life as well, that of a biker babe with an overwhelming case of wanderlust, one that couldn’t be satisfied by a weekend holiday. Her days in a cubicle were numbered, and it wasn’t long before she was back on her bike and looking for adventure. Armed only with the Spanish words for “caution” and “cheese,” Lois set off to conquer America—both Americas, actually. Starting in Alaska and working her way down the Pacific Coast, she rode through snow, desert, and everything in between to reach the southernmost tip of Argentina. Lois tackled every type of fellow biker imaginable and endured everything the continents could throw at her with quick thinking and a vibrant sense of humor. Whether bribing her way through Central American borders, spending the night in a Mexican brothel, or crashing her bike in Patagonia, Lois’s bright, funny travelogue will charm anyone who longs for adventure and a stretch of the open road.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781937747084
Publisher:	Octane Press
Publication date:	11/01/2012
Edition description:	North American Edition
Pages:	368
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.90(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Lois Pryce is a British travel author, freelance journalist, speaker and presenter. She is also a cofounder/curator of the Adventure Travel Film Festival. Torn between the career paths of two illustrious relatives, Max Born, the Nobel Prize Winner in Physics and his granddaughter, Olivia Newton-John, Lois abandoned her interest in Quantum Theory and at the age of sixteen left school and spent the next couple of years as a carrot-picker, painter & decorator and failing an audition as a kiss-o-gram before finding her home in rock ‘n’ roll. After various jobs in record shops and record labels she ended up as a product manager for the BBC. But by 2003, Lois had grown weary of the daily grind in jargon-infested London media-land, so she jacked in her job at the Beeb to ride 20,000 miles from Alaska to the tip of South America astride her 225cc Yamaha trail bike. Upon her return she wrote the book of this trip, Lois on the Loose, which was published in the USA and the UK and translated into several languages. Itchy wheels struck again and it wasn’t long before she was plotting another adventure. In October 2006 she set off once more, this time to ride the length of Africa from London to Cape Town, crossing the Sahara through Algeria and Niger and continuing down the west coast through the Congo and Angola to South Africa. Four months and ten thousand miles later she rolled into Cape Town just about in one piece, having tackled Kalashnikov-wielding soldiers and Angolan minefields along the way. Her book of this awesome adventure, Red Tape & White Knuckles was published in 2008. Since returning from Africa she has written and presented ‘Ladies on the Loose’, a DVD guide to worldwide motorcycle travel from the female perspective, featuring an impressive cast of women adventure riders from around the globe. She is also a contributing editor to Overland Journal, a columnist for Outrider Journal and a co-founder of The Adventure Travel Film Festival which takes place in the USA and the UK each year. When she’s not on the road she lives on a Dutch barge in London with her motorcycle adventurer husband, Austin Vince with whom she has just returned from a coast-to-coast ride across the USA in a Ural sidecar outfit. The rest of her hours are spent pickin’ ‘n’ grinning as the banjo player in all-girl London bluegrass band, The Jolenes.

Editorial Reviews

Bored by her desk job at the BBC, Pryce decided to convert her travel daydreams into real-life adventure. At her local travel bookshop, she discovered a book called Jupiter's Travels by Ted Simon as well as a few handbooks on motorcycle adventuring, and she was hooked. She bought a small dirt bike, a versatile and affordable Yamaha XT225 Serow, and decided she'd bike from Anchorage, Alaska, to the southernmost city of South America, Ushuaia, Argentina-almost 20,000 miles. In this engaging read, Pryce narrates the adventure. Local bikers helped the witty and sociable Pryce get her Serow fixed, strangers offered shelter or advice and various friends joined her, for better or worse. She rode through flaking dried mud and boulder-strewn donkey paths, through broiling desert heat and blinding Andean snows. Armchair travelers will delight in this funny, vivid account and-almost-wish they'd done it themselves. B&w photos throughout. (Mar.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Another spunky gal takes things in hand and becomes empowered, this time astride a small Yamaha motorcycle with cell phone and e-mail ever at the ready. Fresh from a desultory job at the BBC in London, Pryce carried on at 55 m.p.h., down the length of the Western Hemisphere from Anchorage to Tierra del Fuego. The tale of her nine-month trek has all the requisite road-trip ingredients: big bugs, bad food and lots of dirt. Indomitable Lois tells of venal bureaucrats, prepubescent border guards, good-looking biker guys and severe digestive distress. She tented in the wild Yukon and rode down the AlCan and Pacific Coast Highways, pausing for a visit with friends to a cheesy L.A. strip club. Pidgin Spanish, icky tacos and insects in the domain of Subcomandante Marcos marked the next leg of her trip, down the Pan-American Highway. Journeying through Central America, across the isthmus and on to South America, she encountered thieves, fixers and tatty digs, petty corruption and jolly drinkers. Machu Picchu, Lake Titicaca, the winds of Patagonia and all the rugged landscapes were fine settings for the cycling hijinks-and for an unpleasant companion's nasty crash. Pryce also recalls some of the square-jawed natives along her way, including the sexy repair guys of the Andes. After a bit of pizza in the New World's southernmost city, it's back to London and propriety. And so we bid farewell to the rapture of the open road celebrated so cheerfully in this biker sitcom by a young woman who declares her "obsession with all things noisy, greasy and rockin'."A long ride on a dirt bike, on the mild side as often as the wild.

Kirkus Reviews