Storm

April 15, 2000
Seasoned traveler Noren appreciates spontaneity and Spartan discipline. His girlfriend, Suzanne, shared his passion enough to take dead-end jobs and save to travel as long as six months to a year at a time. But their planned motorcycle trip around the Baltic Sea threatened to test their emotional resolve, physical endurance, and relationship. Tension between them built with every hardship of the six-month journey through Germany, Denmark, the Baltic states, and, finally, Poland. They encountered treacherously foul weather, campsites infested with drunken travelers, a cast of helpful hosts, and Americans and Europeans traveling in bands and alone to escape mundane everyday life. Noren's accounts of a celebration of machismo motorcycle culture at a rally and a 115-mile-an-hour ride through the mountains of northern Sweden are highlights of a beautifully written book that is as much about holding a relationship together in trying circumstances as it is about the thrills of motorcycle travel and of traveling sparsely and spontaneously. ((Reviewed April 15, 2000))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2000, American Library Association.)