Devastated after the drowning death of his wife, Suzanne, fifty-year-old Howard Munro resigns his tenure as head of the English department at St. Martin's College in Toledo, Ohio. Hoping to make a fresh start in his life and with a new job waiting for him in southern California, he strikes out for San Diego in his motor home. En route, he picks up a rain-soaked hitchhiker, Miriam Kovacs, a down-on-her-luck unemployed waitress thumbing her way west. Culturally and socially the two travelers are a study in opposites: the successful, well-educated, and pro-life Munro; and Kovacs, a marginalized high school dropout with a long history of menial jobs and failed relationships-a woman intent on terminating her unwanted pregnancy. Yet despite the differences that divide them, their journey across America will unite them in an unexpected meeting of hearts and minds. The woman provides Munro with the first female companionship since the passing of his wife. The professor gives Kovacs-an unsophisticated woman who has rarely ventured beyond her Philadelphia home-her first glimpse of new horizons and new values. In the process, both people will be changed forever.