Local Authors Paula Holmes Eber and Lorenz Eber launch their new book "Breathtaking"

What happens when an anthropologist wife and an aeronautical and civil engineer husband decide to take a family vacation with their daughters while raising awareness of asthma and the world’s critical need for clean air?  They decide on a bicycling trip of course – circumnavigating the entire planet.  The Ebers’ new book, Breathtaking: How One Family Cycled Around the World for Clean Air and Asthma, details their epic vacation and on June 26, 2022 they will share with us the wonders they saw, the mishaps they endured and the triumph they ultimately achieved.  Their stories promise will make for a fascinating evening that you will not want to miss.

About Breathtaking:

Breathtaking is the exciting, hilarious and at times harrowing, account of a family’s bike adventure around the world.  Their goal: to raise awareness of asthma – a disease that Paula has suffered from her entire life – and the world’s desperate need for clean air by becoming the first family to circumnavigate the world by bicycle. And bicycle they did, pedaling 14,931 kilometers in an unbroken line through Europe and Asia, along to Australia, across the South Pacific and finally North America. Family bonding takes on a new meaning as the Ebers face one challenge after the other: a 100-degree heat wave in Italy, drug smugglers in Russia, a snowstorm on the Great Wall of China and a broken foot in New Zealand, among others. Thousands of miles from home, they learn that their greatest challenge is not the journey itself, but the transformation they must undergo within themselves, if they are to survive the trip.

Paula Homes-Eber, Ph.D. is an anthropologist, professor and the author of six previous books. She has published dozens of articles about cycling and adventuring as a family, including frequent contributions to Adventure Cyclist and the League of American Bicyclists Magazine. Paula is director of Bike for Breath (www.bike4breath.com), whose purpose is to inspire people to travel by bicycle, promoting clean air and a healthy environment so that all of us can breathe.

Lorenz Eber, P.E., is an aeronautical and civil engineer. In addition to his passion for cycling, he is a private pilot, a sailor, and a photographer. His photographs have appeared in numerous books and magazines, including Time Magazine and on the cover of Adventure Cyclist.