All right, so I have in front of me.

That's the sound of a very old globe spinning.

I'm going to close my eyes.

I'm going to try and spin this globe

and do my best to land my finger somewhere

on the United States of America. Hang on.

Oh, I did it.

And where am I?

I am in Oregon.

Okay, so I got to get to Oregon.

I could hop on a flight, no problem.

I could even get on the highway, that's a heck of a long drive

but it would be easy to find places to eat and stay all along my way. This was not always the case

back in the 1930s and 40s, a woman named Bessie Stringfield

did exactly this kind of thing.

She would take a penny and roll it over a map. And wherever it landed, that's where she would go.

She would get there on her motorcycle. There were no cheap, easy domestic flights. There were not even highways yet. The roads were rough. They weren't

always paved. And Bessie, who was a young black woman, faced a lot of discrimination and hardship on the road. But something

kept calling to her. She ran out of money, she would just join a local circus and do motorcycle tricks to help keep her going.

If she couldn't find a place to stay, she would sleep on her bike or just out under the stars

And Bessie crisscrossed the United States this way. In fact, she did it eight times

She became the first black woman to ever ride a motorcycle through every one of the lower 48 states.

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