Even their guidebooks – Worst Places to Eat, Wackiest Roadside Attractions, and Don't Go Here! – offer no guidance. These two 16-year-olds are off on a summer-long road trip, Los Angeles to Atlanta, without any clear idea what they are doing, what they might run into, or what they might discover along the way. They don't even know one another. Wendell regards Tyler with uneasiness and something like lust; Tyler thinks of Wendell with curiosity and contempt, mostly contempt. They are launched on this adventure (in a luxury motorhome, of all things) by Wendell's mother, who supposes that a trip into the unknown – weaponless and clueless – will cause her son to flower. Tyler comes along to see if she can make it through without beheading, or bedding, Wendell.
Taking off from Los Angeles, this first section of the sometimes dangerous, sometimes comic, journey takes them eventually to Tombstone, by way of karaoke bars, alpine slides, bowling alleys, bars, caves, nudist colonies, prisons, luxury spas, art installations, kindly people and lunatics, Native Americans and crackers, excursions across the Mexican border. They even manage, without ever willing it, sporadic tours of their own minds and hearts.