RIDERS ON THE STORM:

A Very Long Ride (Alex Hanson, 11/13/10, Valley News)

The difficult emotions surrounding her parents' divorce sent Linny Kenney in search of a horse. Horses weren't new to her. She got her first pony, and later a horse, when she was growing up in Bath, N.H. But a few years of wandering after graduation from Plymouth State left little time for horses -- until she needed them.

“Horses have been what I have turned to whenever I was frustrated about anything,” Kenney said. She also revived a childhood dream: to ride across the country. On March 1, she headed east from Los Angeles with her Arabian gelding, Sojourner, and friend Walter Rowland.

Sitting in the kitchen of Jim and Ginger Wimberg's Weathersfield home, Kenney and Rowland, both 29, were near the end of the trail and the beginning of something else. They plan to reach Kenney's childhood home in Bath on Nov. 20, taking the next week or so to traverse the Upper Valley.

A trek across the country yields two storylines -- one about the traveler and one about the country itself. Kenney wanted to know whether love and goodness still flourished across the land, and if so, how. She wanted to know if she could persevere through the hard times. The trip has been a success on both counts, and in ways neither she nor Rowland expected.

“We've just gotten all kinds of people's day-to-day stories,” she said, calling them “an example of how open and trusting people are in this country.”

“We've learned so much about ourselves and about people in general,” Rowland said. “The main thing,” he added, is that “everybody is good at their core and most people are good all the way through. Open and generous, caring and trusting.”

Aside from their overnight stays in a tent, all of their lodgings, mostly at farms or ranches, were donated. Strangers all across the country fed them, let them wash clothes, gave them places to rest when they were worn out from the road, then helped them on their way. Sojourner often was an icebreaker, but Jim Wimberg said that he could tell right away that he would be happy to have Kenney and Rowland under his roof.

“Without saying anything, they look like really good people,” he said. They stayed with the Wimbergs Wednesday and Thursday night. Rowland worked with Christian Wimberg, one of the Wimbergs' sons, at TeleAtlas in Lebanon after college. Wimberg said the young travelers gave him the sense that “the country's in pretty good shape.”

“If that's part of the country, I'm not worried. We're just going through a bad time, and things’ll get better again,” Wimberg said.