Changing Gears: A Distant Teen, a Desperate Mother, and 4,329 Miles Across the Transamerica Bicycle Trail

What happens when a mother and her 16-year-old son drop everything to bike across the country? On the TransAmerica Bicycle Trail, they struggle up hills in the pouring rain, they feel soreness in muscles they didn’t know they had, and they learn more about each other than they ever knew before. When licensed clinical therapist and self-proclaimed “reluctant adventurer” Leah Day felt herself drifting from her son, Oakley, she decided to make a drastic play to reconnect. In this memoir chronicling the journey of a lifetime, Leah and Oakley find that if they can push themselves to accomplish physically exhausting and emotionally taxing milestones on a bike, they are capable of anything!

Leah Day lives on Peaks Island in Maine with her husband, four children, and dog, Cricket. A licensed clinical therapist and former Outward Bound instructor, she now owns and operates Lighthouse Bikes in South Portland, Maine, and documents her outdoor adventures on her blog bikemum.com.