"The audacity of driving a horseless carriage from coast to coast nearly a century ago is hard to imagine today. Roads, where they existed, might be nothing more than muddy ruts, sources of gasoline or replacement parts were few and far between, and the traveler was subject to all of nature's perils and discomforts.".

"For a woman to make such a drive was, at the time, a jaw-dropping event. Yet in 1909, 22-year-old Alice Ramsey and three female companions piled into a Maxwell in New York City and began a trip that would end 59 days later in San Francisco. A few years later silent film star Anita King would become the first woman to make the drive solo.

These and other early coast-to-coast drives, recounted here day by day, proved women's growing independence, as well as the automobile's long-distance viability."--BOOK JACKET.