Road to Montevideo

Helen Richardson, a single woman of 27, embarked on a very unique adventure on November 21, 1941. With war raging in Europe and about to begin in the Pacific, she set sail from San Francisco in a banana boat for South America, where she would spend a year cycling on her own. First a short stop at Panama and then on to Chile, where she began a journey that would take her over the Andes, across the Argentine Pampa to Buenos Aires and finally to Uruguay, where she was detained for two weeks in September 1942 on suspicions of being a Nazi spy. After 6,000 miles of cycling, she was ordered to return to the United States by the U.S. State Department, thus ending a year early her planned two year adventure. This is the story of a fiercely independent woman, undertaking the adventure of her life, a journey rarely heard of even today.