What inspires our dreams? For Jana Danielson, it’s during a 1986 summer family vacation- the summer she’s fourteen and about to enter high school- a Route 66 trip her dad took in 1964 and wants to recreate with his family in their new station wagon. Jana, her parents, and her sisters (Katie and Lisa- Jana playing the middle sister role, sandwiched between them) venture west, exploring as much of what’s left of Route 66 with their first major stop in Albuquerque. While Jana knows she wants to be a writer and she has encouragement from her entire family- particularly a new pink spiral-bound notebook her mother Donna gave her for the trip- she finds herself questioning what story she will tell. Her father Mike books the family into the Twilight Sands Hotel on Route 66 in Albuquerque and it’s there that Jana begins to feel a connection to the past. It’s also the place that she learns her father had fallen in love with another woman all those years ago.

In Los Angeles, where they stay for a week, Jana meets Surfer Scott and for the first time begins to understand what it’s like to form a meaningful relationship with a boy, especially when he offers to teach her somewhat clumsy self to surf.