From a distance (to quote the late great Texan songwriter Nanci Griffith) it would be easy to mistake Simon Parker as belonging to that peloton of travel writers for whom clocking up maximum miles is the thing. His first book, “Riding Out” charted a 3,427-mile cycle ride around Britain in 2020, while in 2016, for a BBC World Service radio documentary about human endurance, he sailed and cycled half-way around the world, 15,000 miles from China to London, traversing the US on two wheels in the process. His website testifies to numerous other intrepid and often physically gruelling adventures that have taken him to 120 countries over the past decade alone.

His second book, “A Ride Across America: A 7,000km Adventure Through the Small Towns & Big Issues of the USA” is published ahead of the US presidential election this November, with Parker embarking on a 21-date UK autumn theatre tour to promote it. While the book features another epic cycle ride, 4,000 miles from Cape Flattery in Washington state to Key West in Florida, it’s not about the bike. Rather his intention was to get under the skin of rural America, and encounter ordinary middle Americans. Parker is excellent company; his book an illuminating portrait of a country we think we know but almost certainly don’t.

“I’m not remotely interested in bicycles except as a way of helping my writing,” Parker tells me when we meet over coffee in a bucolic Cotswold pub. “But when I cycled across America in 2016, I realised that having a bicycle heavily loaded with bags was an incredible ice-breaker for developing conversations with complete strangers. I worked in news journalism for years, and so I know that if you turn up for an interview with lights, cameras, microphones, you lose any element of spontaneity. Whereas if you’re cycling along and you haven’t showered for three days, and you’ve got a British accent, people naturally start talking to you.”

Parker’s fascination with the United States of America began during his 1990s working-class childhood in rural Oxfordshire, during which he learned to think of the US as “the Big Daddy of geopolitics”. After hitch-hiking around Australia and New Zealand with a tent and a fishing rod for a year after he left school, he did a degree in Theatre and Film. His major in American New Wave cinema left him with a heightened fascination with America and also with “how a country portrays itself, and how that conflicts with what it’s really like”. A career in journalism and film-making, beginning with an internship at the BBC in Oxford, followed. But after that afore-mentioned cycle ride across the US at speed in 2016, he began to think that he might have “failed to scrutinise the country with the journalistic rigour it deserved”.

By Spring 2023 Parker had conceived the “crazy notion” for a book about a slower American journey, but which would be published at speed for maximum topicality. The trip itself took 10 weeks, from the end of August to the first week of November 2023. “Afterwards I had a few days rest at home, and then I spent five months solidly writing, submitting a first draft by the end of the following February.” Alongside the inevitable punctures, ubiquitous junk food and bear scare stories, at the heart of the book are Parker’s dozens of encounters across 11 states with diverse people with whom he falls into conversation: a homeless African-American man on the streets of Seattle; elders of the Mormon church; a Mexico-born Catholic priest; and a valiant school librarian, trying to maintain the access of young people to banned books, including “The Color Purple” and “The Hate U Give”.

Hot conversation topics include drugs, social media, abortion, the “stolen 2020 election” and – inevitably – the right to bear arms. At the start of Parker’s journey, a man on a mountain bike tells him “I hope you’re ready to see… shit loads of guns, son. You be really fucking careful out there.” But by the time he gets to Florida, he has gained instructive – and perhaps surprising – insights into this tinder box topic.

“Most nationalities require a bit of warming up, a few minutes of foreplay,” writes Parker. “Not Americans. Most cut right to the chase. They say it how it is. Candid hot takes. No holds barred opinions.” This kind of statement on Americans in general is atypical of the book, however. Parker avoids coming to any easy conclusions about the state of the nation; in fact he regards the “United” States of America as something of a misnomer. “How connected can a farmer in Nebraska really be with a stockbroker from Manhattan? They are two totally different things, geographically, socially, culturally. America as a single country is far too big to have any level of cohesion.” And yet slowly, a few uniting characteristics became a refrain. A concern for the state of the economy. A yen for one’s own fenced patch of land. And freedom. “You can’t go a day or even an hour without an American talking to you about freedom. There is a fiercely loyal commitment from people on the right and on the left and everywhere in between to not wanting to be told what to do. The desire to be independent is incredibly hard-wired.”

“A Ride Across America”, written “from a place of intrigue, love and admiration”, does not attempt to predict the result of the 2024 US election, though for the record, Parker tells me he wouldn’t be “remotely surprised” if President Trump was re-elected. Instead it replaces the soundbites with a plurality of voices and opinions. “As a writer, you have a responsibility to be constantly refreshing hackneyed narratives about a place,” asserts Parker. “That’s the sort of journalism I’ve always strived to make, and want to continue to make.”

Now the father of a baby daughter, Parker is having to recalibrate his free-wheeling career a little, but is ambitious to write more under-the-skin of a place travel books in future; he is far from finished with writing about America for one thing. He is also committed to a style of travel writing that is “not just another old book about some adventurous, middle-class white bloke, going off on a journey. Because that’s just boring.”

Interview by Caroline Sanderson. This article first appeared in The Bookseller magazine.