The debut memoir by the massively popular female adventure travelers and the creator behind the 2.4-Million follower YouTube account Itchy Boots, taking readers behind the scenes of her first 20,000 mile motorcycle journey through the world’s most remarkable and remote places.
FREE RIDE:
Heartbreak, Courage, and the 20,000-Mile Motorcycle Journey that Changed my Life
by Noraly Schoenmaker
Atria, June 2025
(via Park & Fine Literary and Media)
In 2018, Noraly Schoenmaker was a thirty-something geologist living in the Netherlands when she learned that her live-in partner had been having a long-term affair. Suddenly without a place to stay, she quit her job, sold her house, and flew to India, planning to spend a year exploring before returning home. But an excursion on a rented motorcycle through the Himalayas changed her life forever—she had found a new obsession. Soon, she decided to purchase a motorcycle and a GoPro, and set off on more unconventional adventures.
When she first left Delhi, climbing mountain passes and crossing rickety wooden bridges into Myanmar, she had no idea that her journeys would come to surpass one-hundred-sixty-thousand kilometers (and counting) through sixty countries on five continents. All she knew was that on the back of her motorcycle, she felt instantly and profoundly free while riding.
FREE RIDE recounts Noraly’s first twenty thousand miles from India to Southeast Asia, then the Middle East, Central Asia, and finally back through Russia and Europe to the Netherlands. More Bruce Chatwin, Cheryl Strayed, and The Motorcycle Diaries than Elizabeth Gilbert, FREE RIDE is a travel memoir like no other because Noraly is a traveler like no other.
Noraly Schoenmaker is the creator of Itchy Boots, a YouTube channel with more than two million loyal subscribers. A motorcycling obsessive, her journeys have taken her the length of the American continent, from Argentina to Alaska; from the northernmost point of Europe to the southernmost point of Africa; and to some of the least traveled regions of the globe. Trained as a biologist and geologist, she is based in the Netherlands.
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