The Mom Who Took Off On Her Motorcycle: Life Lessons on the Road to Alaska

At 52, after raising her “4+2+1” brood—four kids, two stepkids and one unofficially adopted Ethiopian daughter— Diana Bletter faced an empty nest. What would she do now? And more importantly, who was she now? With nothing left to call her own, she decided to ride a motorcycle (with her husband on his motorcycle) from Long Island up to Alaska and back again. Only one slight problem: she’d never been on a motorcycle before. With six motorcycle lessons’ worth of experience, she took off, traveling across a continent, and then up the Alaska Highway, a road that is “sometimes dangerous, often unpredictable, and always saddled with the solitude of a frontier trail.” She and her husband, alone together for the first time in years, confront fierce winds, drenching rains, grizzly bears, moose—and each other. Full of spiritual insights, observations and humor, The Mom Who Took Off on Her Motorcycle captures the way two people, madly in love and yet so different, learn to count on each other and rediscover their love—despite an accident that almost tears them apart. This story of a 10,000-mile journey to the Great White North is the inspiring tale of how one woman takes off to discover who she was before she had children and to find out who she could still become.