While our chief blogger Cara is still cycling across Nebraska this week, here's another University of Nebraska Press cycling memoir to check out: An American Cycling Odyssey, 1887 by Kevin J. Hayes. In 1887 a twenty-one-year-old newspaperman named George Nellis (1865–1948) rode a bicycle from Herkimer, New York, to San Francisco in seventy-two days, surpassing the transcontinental bicycle record by several weeks. He passed through Nebraska on his trip and he also managed to meet the legendary baseball player A. G. Spalding in Chicago, take in professional baseball games in Detroit and Chicago, participate in several bicycle races in Omaha, attend an opera in Cheyenne, Wyoming, enjoy a circus, and eat over two dozen bananas in one sitting in Osceola, Indiana.

I suspect Nebraska author and long-time University of Nebraska-Lincoln English professor Louise Pound (1872–1958) would've been a fan of riding across Nebraska. A distingished scholar as well as a multiple-sport athlete, in 1895 she earned a Century Road club bar for riding 100 miles in one day. (and she repeated the feat in 1896.) Robert Cochran details Louise's interesting life of scholarship, athleticism, and pioneering feminism in his new biography, Louise Pound.