Day 1: Monday, July 8, 1968 - St. Paul, MN to Oakes, ND

Click within the boxes on the map to zoom to a more detailed map.

We left Spring Green, Wisconsin on a Saturday, July 29, 1978. Twenty-five miles down the road in Richland Center, our luggage rack broke. We briefly considered giving up, then said the hell with it and bought a new one. That is the best $75.00 we ever spent. The end of the first day saw us in Paynesville, Minnesota, distance covered 354 miles. On our second day, we passed through Breckenridge Minnesota, the first town mentioned in Pirsig's book. Breckenridge is right on the border. Of course, I had to have my wife pose for a quick picture. On the outskirts of Breckenridge were hundreds and hundreds of acres of sunflowers. The next town on Pirsig's route is Wyndmere where an overpowering storm threatens to engulf them. When they finally stop for the night in Oakes, ND and sign in at the motel, Sylvia notices that Pirsig's hands are unsteady. She says, "You look awfully pale. Did that lightning shake you up? You look like you'd seen a ghost." Little does she know.

On 9/30/05, Robert Pirsig wrote this about the first day's route:

"When John and Sylvia and Chris and I set out that morning we could not have dreamed that 37 years later we would get questions from around the world about which route we were going to take, yet here they are. I wonder what the questions will be like 37 years from now. The exact route out of Minneapolis is very vague in memory but I seem to recall that we went north to the US 10 highway that still follows the old Northern Pacific railroad (now Burlington Northern) through Anoka, St, Cloud, and Fargo to the West Coast. The freeway that replaced it was I-94. US 10 goes more north than we wanted to go, so after a while we worked our way west and north along a number of roads to highway 210 and followed it to Oakes, North Dakota. If we had been smarter we probably would have taken Hwy 55, but we didn¹t really have any route in mind and I don¹t remember even looking at a map as we left Minneapolis. We just eyeballed it, and went north and west along whatever looked good at the moment. The angle of the sun was our main guide. To really reproduce the feelings of that trip you should just estimate the general direction you want to go and pick a road--any road--and see where it takes you. Road numbers and maps are very static. Not knowing where you¹re going is more Dynamic and that is how we felt that day."