Ken Youngblood will be presenting on his book “Turning Centuries” at the Saranac Village at Will Rogers on Aug. 29, and leading a travel writing workshop at the Adirondack Center for Writing this weekend. (Enterprise photo — Aaron Marbone)

SARANAC LAKE — In the summer of 1981, Ken Youngblood rode his bike from Saranac Lake to the Pacific Ocean, in hopes of rekindling a love — a trip that changed his life and introduced him to a love of bike touring.

Last year, he published a book, “Turning Centuries,” about his decades of two-wheeled adventures across America and on three continents, chronicling the colorful characters he met, the close calls he survived and what he learned about the world and himself on the road.

On Saturday, he’ll be leading a free travel writing workshop at the Adirondack Center for Writing, sharing tips from two of his passions — traveling and writing. On Aug. 29 he’ll be presenting on the book at the Saranac Village at Will Rogers at 2 p.m.

“Turning centuries” is a bike touring phrase for pedaling 100-plus miles in a day.

The book is one in the American tradition of traveling across the country, adrift and alone, hitchhiking without good maps, without cell phones and without much money. It describes a type of bicycling touring that Youngblood said does not exist anymore in a world that does not exist anymore, but is preserved in his book.

Youngblood is an evangelist for travel — specifically, non-motorized travel. He says bike touring is raw, personal and made him rely on the kindness of strangers.

He always loved to read, but the bike is what got him into storytelling. He had all these wonderful stories to tell from bicycling.

The narrative moves forward and backward in time, centered on his first cross-country tour and his bid to meet an ex-girlfriend named Kim while weaving in stories from tours in Chile, Canada and Cuba.

The book is part autobiography, part diary, part travel journal, part philosophic, part history lesson and part cultural snapshot.

He doesn’t dwell on the dull realities of cross-country biking — the fixes, the miles — though he describes them. He focuses on adventures — sleeping in prairies and outlaw camps in Brazil, hopping freight — something he says he would never do now — and running naked after a bicycle thief.

He paints each character so clear, seeing them for who they are — defined people — as vivid as real life.

As he biked, Youngblood kept a tape recorder in a holster on his hip. When he started talking to someone interesting, as soon as he remembered “I have a recorder!” he’d start rolling. At night, lying in his tent, he’d record his notes, his recollections of the day and the conversations he had. He also always kept rolls of film on him.

The book is the product of literal decades of work. He started the first draft in 1982, 40 years before it published, on a set of floppy disks. It then moved through version after version of Microsoft Word.

Part of what took so long to finish was getting “stuck,” a common feeling for writers. Youngblood said he had the whole book … except an ending.

In 2020, he sent Kim the first chapter, where he details the end of their relationship in the Adirondacks. She replied, telling him she’d give her input on Chapter 1. Two years passed before she found her thoughts written out in her “drafts” folder and contacted Youngblood again.

The emails contained what he calls “soulful, beautiful writing.” He finally found the ending.

The last pages of the book are Youngblood’s final stories, final thoughts and a ledger of their correspondence after years of not speaking. He’s since revised the ending with new information.

At times, the Youngblood is painfully open about his regrets in life and failed relationships. He said didn’t know he would write about that, and that writing about personal relationships took a “delicate” balance of telling his story while not infringing on the private lives of the people important to him.

“That’s the problem with a memoir,” Youngblood said. “You’re talking about your life and your life is not separate from the people you care about. But you have this story to tell.”

He said he changed some names and some locations to protect their identities.

Youngblood’s friends tell him they are surprised he was so open about his life in the book.

“I don’t come off as such a good guy,” he said, but adding that it’s the unvarnished truth.

It is hard to tell if he is weaving tales from his time biking North America through this story of traveling for love or if he is weaving a love story through his bike stories.

The bike is his window into his life story. The people he talks to are his window into American history. The landscape he describes in beautiful detail are his window into natural history. The scars in that landscape cut by the roads he travels are his window into industrial history.

“You can’t get on a bicycle and go over a mountain without being aware that there’s a stream nearby, because all of a sudden the temperature changes,” Youngblood said. “You become aware of how we’re treating the earth because you’re lying on it every night.”

Youngblood said he likes bike touring in third-world countries the most. The third-world is less changed than first-world, he said.

“Those folks know a reality most of us are cushioned from,” he said. “The less they have the more they give of themselves.”

Breaking through the language barrier is exhilarating, too, he said.

“Those people taught me so much about what it means to be human,” Youngblood said.

Before that first ride in 1981, he had never been on a long bike ride before, and was smoking a pack of unfiltered Camels a day. The trip brought a physical change in him. And traveling by bike became fundamental to his life, shaping who he is.

“The most important journey in the book is myself,” Youngblood said.

He said he had wanted to heighten his spirituality, and it finally happened on the bike.

“A bicycle is just a vehicle for experiencing life,” he said.

It has no security and brought him places with nothing familiar around.

Youngblood said humans are probably the most adaptable creatures on the planet. But once they adapt, they tend to get stuck in their ways and resistant to change. Habit has its place, he said — it streamlines actions — but it can hold people back, too. It’s easier to reflect when not surrounded by the familiar, he said.

He had a lot to think about. An ex-girlfriend had told him “You don’t know how to love.” He also needed to work through his perception of what it means to be a man, inherited from his father, a hard man, and think about his mother, who absorbed his father’s anger and lack of compassion.

After examining his scars, he said this week, he is amazed by his heart’s capacity for love today. That capacity was found on the bike, he added.

Youngblood was a part-time features writer for the Enterprise for around two years in the mid-1990s and a writing professor at North Country Community College for four decades.

Youngblood published “Turning Centuries” last June. He said it was a huge disappointment, only selling a couple hundred copies. It’s available in local book and bike stores.

The workshop, “Finding Your Way,” will include information on how a writer prepares for travel, the writer’s mindset while traveling and the skills needed to rekindle the experience in the reader’s mind. Attendees will also experiment with how to choose words, shape sentences and compose the whole of a compelling piece of travel writing.

The workshop on Aug. 10 will be held from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. at 15 Broadway in Saranac Lake. Enrollment is limited to 15 and people can register at tinyurl.com/2s4bu4yn.

To keep the workshop centered on the participants’ own skills, Ken is asking participants to email him at kedsony@hotmail.com as soon as possible after signing up to tell him why they signed up and what they want out of the workshop.