Two Wheels Down

Earning its place in the established canon of great motorcycle diaries, Two Wheels Down reads like the most illustrative of travelogues, and the most exciting of adventure stories. Touching, harrowing, reflective, and exuberant, here is a narrative that howls with the call of the open road. Rumbling and richly detailed, it is the culmination of several months-long journeys across 20 European countries, on a Harley Davidson named KB—the Knargly Bastard.

This book is required reading for motorcycle enthusiasts, but one needn’t be a biker to be carried away by the author’s fierce passion for living well beyond the edges of safety, comfort, and familiarity. Woven throughout are candid accounts of the tolls such a life exacts on a marriage, as well as the tender willingness to pull through, to lean into the curves of uncertainty, find balance on the road ahead, and ultimately to navigate life with love as its only guidance system. In this sense, there is something Thoreauvian in these journeys of a man getting lost, only to find a stronger, more present version of himself in distant realms both geographic and mystical.