One for the Read : Burned Out and All Shook Up, Couple Opt to Pursue Life on the Great American Road : “Roads From the Ashes: An Odyssey in Real Life on the Virtual Frontier,”; by Megan Edwards; (Trilogy Books: $14.95; paperback; 210 pages).

Life dealt Megan Edwards a triple punch in the early ‘90s.

Her 40th birthday hit her “like Dorothy’s house hit the witch.” A wildfire destroyed her home in the hills above Pasadena. And before Edwards had recovered from those traumas, the Northridge earthquake struck, shaking what little confidence she had retained.

Edwards found herself stripped of both a permanent address and the material goods that define personal identity in the United States during the ‘90s: “If life in the last decade of the century in America is a solar system, stuff is its sun. Our lives revolve around it, and its absence creates a powerful vacuum, the kind nature abhors.”

Rather than rebuild their home, she and her husband, Mark Sedenquist, decided to pursue their dream of living on the road without a fixed address. At the Revcon factory in Irvine, they chose a Trailblazer, a $75,000 customized motor home built on a 1-ton Ford truck chassis and powertrain.

As they crisscrossed the American West, she wrote newspaper articles about the places they visited and people they talked to.

The big Trailblazer, dubbed “The Phoenix One,” proved a great icebreaker. Because few people had ever seen one, they asked questions about it, then related their own stories and suggested more distant places and people worth seeing.

In Seattle, Edwards visited the Boeing factory--and a man who makes beanbags in the shape of cows, penguins and lobsters for amateur jugglers. She, her husband and their dog, Marvin, wandered the country, stopping at a moving but little-known Vietnam veterans memorial outside Taos, N.M.; the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.; and the annual Kinetic Sculpture Race in Eureka in Northern California.

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But the interesting places and people had to be balanced against a host of problems. The Phoenix was just too big to negotiate some of the narrower roads they encountered, and Edwards tactfully avoids mentioning its gas mileage. She had planned to file her articles via modem, but cellular phone connections proved spotty in remote parts of the country.

Even the largest motor home offers a finite amount of space, and Edwards and her husband had a hard time adjusting to living in constant proximity: “Our pipe dream had met reality with a thud. . . . We’d dreamed of glorious horizons, but all we were finding were tacks in the road.”

The Edwardses eventually established a modus vivendi. With the help of some technologically minded friends, they launched their online newsletter (https://www.roadtripamerica.com) in February 1996. The Web site continues to gain in popularity, providing them with the means to continue their peripatetic lifestyle, 130,000 miles (and counting) down the road.

Although the author’s philosophy rarely goes much deeper than “A path is nothing unless it’s taken,” she invites the reader to accompany her and her husband as they travel down some unusual ones in this pleasantly chatty book.

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Charles Solomon can be reached at highway1@latimes.com.