At age 24, never having cycled more than a few miles (except for a 20-mile training stint), Jamie Penn jumped on a plane with her mom to ride 40 or so miles a day for two weeks across the southwest corner of Ireland. And it was on the coast of County Kerry that she caught the bug — in the drenching rain, climbing nearly 2,000 ft. each day, with daily Guinness breaks at village pubs. It must have been the Guinness.

It was the visceral pleasure of touring — being part of the journey, rather than seeing flashes of it through a window in a temperature controlled box. It was both harsh and gritty and mystifyingly green, gorgeous, and pure. By the third day, she’d decided she wanted to live her life like that.

And while she did choose a less than conventional lifestyle over the status quo, she started a business a year after she’d returned, and later, a family. And, naturally, her three children became the biggest (and entirely satiating) adventure in her life.

While she had travelled a bit, and once for a longish period, her kids have heard more tales from her short stint in Ireland than from any of her other travels. They’ve found stashes of pictures and poetry about dark, hollowed-out pubs, stone circles, the sheer, harrowing cliffs along the coast. And, they could recite her speeches about traveling by bike, being one with the elements, and so on.

After becoming a single mother when the twins were five years-old and her daughter was seven, anything beyond biking her kids to school, or a quick jaunt down to the beach seemed light years away. For the first couple of years after divorce, she lived the typical two-to-three jobs, night-classes-online, and no-sleep, single-mom lifestyle.

But, she continued to force herself to at least attempt to find moments of peace and solitude, even during those moments when stopping her mind from spinning seemed impossible.

“The day of my actual divorce, I road my beach cruiser ten miles down the beach in a howling nor’easter, and when I returned I felt as though I’d been washed clean,” she said. In the first few months following separation, when her kids would go to their dad’s house, she’d swallow the lump in my throat and either hop on her bike, sprint on the beach, or lay outside in the grass.

“My children are everything to me. They have been since the moment I felt them kick in the womb. But, without me, whole, and soul-fed, they wouldn’t thrive in the same way that they could otherwise.”

So, when her partner, in work (commercial filmmaking) and now in life, Gary Breece, asked her what she wanted to do for a solo vacation, she said, “Cycling … somewhere.” And the pin on the map in her head just happened to have dropped in midcoast Maine.

An avid cyclist in NYC and an Adventure Cycling member, Breece knew where to look. He jumped on the Adventure Cycling website and found the ideal route.

“We had our route, a week to do it, the bikes, and the gear; but as a skilled and often maddening multi-tasker, I felt like something was missing. I was like, ‘we can’t go to the coast of Maine without filming it”” she said. And because it’s not hard to convince a director/cinematographer that shooting is a good idea, Breece was all over it.

So along with vigorously training her 15-years-more-mature body to get on board, they began storyboarding ideas and designing shots.

Although, that’s Penn in the film, and she’d definitely like to say that it fits her, it slightly … doesn’t. She’s quite a bit more stress-y and concerned than it appears here. And she finds it very difficult to not have her children with her at any given moment. But she believes in this message, and it’s the philosophy she strives to live by. Breece, who directed and shot it, believes in it too, for her, for all mothers, and for the sake of this generation. The premise was actually his idea.

Practicing this as much as possible in the last three years has helped heal Penn and her children. And as a result, she has watched them become joyful, more secure, and more peaceful … as has she.

After all, “if Mama’s happier, everybody’s happier … right?”

Story by Jamie Penn | Video by Gary Breece and Jamie Penn