The Journey starts at The House on the Rock and ends at a bar which is 637 MIles from Wal Drug-- also the distance from the family home in northern Minnesota at the Lake of the Loon and the Chippewa Maiden to Wall Drug . Having grown up the son of a postal worker obsessed with America's roadside attractions, Henry is living a mundane existence as a reporter for the Chicago Tribune. Then in a two-week period in February, 1986, his father disappears in a flash of light as Halley's comet flies overhead, he receives $1.25 million from the sale of the family home to developers of a casino, and his wife leaves him. His cobbled-together life shattered, he reads his father's travelogue covering sixty-six years and sets out on his own journey across the country in search of his father's obsession. In Tulsa, he meets Trevor Youngblood, a well-connected politician wrangling with moral conflicts and the tatters of his own life lived just beyond the fringes of acceptability, and Dawn Bouvier, the enigmatic proprietor of Dawn of Creation, a junkatorium, located 637 miles from Wall Drug. Together, they onvert the junkatorium to a bar and Henry changes his focus from the road to Dawn.