Lady Long Rider

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Riding 2,000 miles on horseback from Montana to New Mexico sounds like a crazy but thrilling dream or pure hardship and exhaustion. According to Bernice Ende, the trip was all that and more. Since swinging her leg over the saddle for that first long ride in 2005 (at the age of 51), Ende has logged more than 29,000 miles in the saddle, crisscrossing North America on horseback - alone. More than once she has traversed the Great Plains, the Southwest deserts, the Cascade Range, and the Rocky Mountains. Along the way, she discovered a sense of community and love of place that unites people wherever they live. From 2014-2016, she was the first person to ride coast to coast and back again in one trek, winning acclaim from the international Long Riders' Guild and awe from the people she met along the way. Saddle up and come along for the journey of a lifetime.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The triumphant true story of a woman who rode her horse across America in the 1950s, fulfilling her dying wish to see the Pacific Ocean, from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Perfect Horse and The Eighty-Dollar Champion “The gift Elizabeth Letts has is that she makes you feel you are the one taking this trip. This is a book we can enjoy always but especially need now.”—Elizabeth Berg, author of The Story of Arthur Truluv In 1954, sixty-three-year-old Maine farmer Annie Wilkins embarked on an impossible journey. She had no money and no family, she had just lost her farm, and her doctor had given her only two years to live. But Annie wanted to see the Pacific Ocean before she died. She ignored her doctor’s advice to move into the county charity home. Instead, she bought a cast-off brown gelding named Tarzan, donned men’s dungarees, and headed south in mid-November, hoping to beat the snow. Annie had little idea what to expect beyond her rural crossroads; she didn’t even have a map. But she did have her ex-racehorse, her faithful mutt, and her own unfailing belief that Americans would treat a stranger with kindness. Annie, Tarzan, and her dog, Depeche Toi, rode straight into a world transformed by the rapid construction of modern highways. Between 1954 and 1956, the three travelers pushed through blizzards, forded rivers, climbed mountains, and clung to the narrow shoulder as cars whipped by them at terrifying speeds. Annie rode more than four thousand miles, through America’s big cities and small towns. Along the way, she met ordinary people and celebrities—from Andrew Wyeth (who sketched Tarzan) to Art Linkletter and Groucho Marx. She received many offers—a permanent home at a riding stable in New Jersey, a job at a gas station in rural Kentucky, even a marriage proposal from a Wyoming rancher. In a decade when car ownership nearly tripled, when television’s influence was expanding fast, when homeowners began locking their doors, Annie and her four-footed companions inspired an outpouring of neighborliness in a rapidly changing world.

In 1982, at the age of just twenty-three, Elspeth Beard left behind her family and friends in London and set off on a 35,000-mile solo adventure around the world on her motorbike. This is the story of a unique and life-changing adventure.

THE UNDISPUTED CLASSIC OF EQUINE ADVENTURE In the early 1920s, a peaceful Swiss schoolteacher accomplished one of the most extraordinary equestrian journeys in history: Aimé Tschiffely and his two trusty steeds, Mancha and Gato, traveled the incredible distance of ten thousand miles between Buenos Aires and New York. Tschiffely’s Ride recounts the dramatic story of that daring journey. Along the trackless Pampas of Argentina, over Peru’s towering Andes Mountains, through the malaria infested jungles of Central America, across the deserts of Mexico, and on to a rapturous welcome in faraway New York, Tschiffely carries the reader along on an unforgettable quest. Although many taunted him as a fool for daring to make a ride that had never been attempted, the author was greeted as a hero by the president of the United States and given a ticker tape parade by the mayor of New York City. Nearly a century later, the modest Tschiffely is revered as the most influential Long Rider in history. Tschiffely’s journey has inspired five generations to swing into the saddle and seek their own equestrian adventure; his beloved book remains the most famous and enduring equestrian travel tale ever written. “It is a fascinating personal narrative....Tschiffely has told a romantic and adventurous tale.”—Kirkus Reviews “A ride that beats all the great rides of fact and fiction clean out of the field.”—The Times

The world of equestrian travel seldom recognizes international borders, being content to urge its mounted adherents to ride where they will. Few people better symbolize this ancient philosophy of unrestricted freedom than Ana Beker. The only child of Lithuanians who had immigrated to Argentina, Beker grew up surrounded by horses on the vast, wind-swept pampas. Her earliest memories were centered around these four legged friends. She literally grew up in the saddle, ignoring the traditions of the male oriented society which said that a woman s place was by the hearth, not in the saddle. History might have been content to let her stay in her homeland, until a fateful meeting changed her fate forever. In the early 1940s Beker heard a lecture given by Aime Tschiffely, who had himself ridden from Argentina to Washington DC ten years earlier. When the famous horseman scoffed at the young girl s idea to ride alone even further than he had, from Argentina to Canada, Beker accepted Tschiffely s challenge, mounted up, and never looked back. What followed was an equestrian journey of Homeric proportions. With her eyes always on the horizon, Beker began a 17,000 mile mounted odyssey that would fix her place in the annals of equestrian travel history. Amply illustrated, The Courage to Ride is thus not only a thrilling adventure tale, it is also a true account of a wild heart that would not be conquered.

ONE OF USA TODAY'S “20 SUMMER BOOKS YOU WON'T WANT TO MISS” In the bestselling tradition of works by such authors as Susan Orlean and Mary Roach, a New York Times reporter and Pulitzer Prize finalist explores why so many people—including herself—are obsessed with horses. It may surprise you to learn that there are over seven million horses in America—even more than when they were the only means of transportation—and nearly two million horse owners. Acclaimed journalist and avid equestrian Sarah Maslin Nir is one of them; she began riding horses when she was just two years old and hasn’t stopped since. Horse Crazy is a fascinating, funny, and moving love letter to these graceful animals and the people who—like her—are obsessed with them. It is also a coming-of-age story of Nir growing up an outsider within the world’s most elite inner circles, and finding her true north in horses. Nir takes readers into the lesser-known corners of the riding world and profiles some of its most captivating figures. We meet Monty Roberts, the California trainer whose prowess earned him the nickname “the man who listens to horses,” and his pet deer; George and Ann Blair, who at their riding academy on a tiny island in Manhattan’s Harlem River seek to resurrect the erased legacy of the African American cowboy; and Francesca Kelly, whose love for an Indian nobleman shaped her life’s mission: to protect an endangered Indian breed of horse and bring them to America. Woven into these compelling character studies, Nir shares her own moving personal narrative. She details her father’s harrowing tale of surviving the Holocaust, and describes an enchanted but deeply lonely upbringing in Manhattan, where horses became her family. She found them even in the middle of the city, in a stable disguised in an old townhouse and in Central Park, when she chased down truants as an auxiliary mounted patrol officer. And she speaks candidly of how horses have helped her overcome heartbreak and loss. Infused with heart and wit, and with each chapter named after a horse Nir has loved, Horse Crazy is an unforgettable blend of beautifully written memoir and first-rate reporting.

The classic bicycle road racing book first published in 1978 chronicles a 150-kilometer European road race and its competitors in vivid, realistic detail. Reprint.