Don't F-ck Up the Rotation

I started this one back in November while at a training class in Austin.  Finally finished it up this week.

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Puff, Puff, Give

This may seem a little off topic for the ride blog, but stick with me.  I’ll tie it up at the end

My daily schedule is a pretty regimented thing: Wake up, get ready, drive to work, go to lunch, work, drive home, play with the kids, do baths and bedtimes, fight with the kids to go to sleep, visit with my wife.  Go to bed.

Looks kind of boring written out but there is a nice kind of symmetry to the whole thing and all of the time spent is pretty meaningful.

There never seems to be time for anything else.  You tend to wonder what it might be like to have lots more time for hobbies and entertainment.  I’ve been out of town for training all this week.  The training starts at 9 and ends at 4:30.  I also have a 5 minute commute from the hotel to the classroom.  This leaves my evenings completely, frighteningly free.

Here is what I have done with all that time:

• Bought a t-shirt
• Played over 10 hours of Borderlands 2 (Of course I brought the Playstation)

No blog entries, no ride planning, no ride prep.  No desperately needed budget/financial planning work, no writing.  What the hell is wrong with me.  I’m always bitching about a lack of free time.  It’s why I can’t get anything done on the bike or house.  Apparently not.

When you have the time to do something, do you have the passion?  The energy? Doesn’t seem like I do this week.  So what is the real problem here?  Maybe the training is really taxing  (It is a bit dry and hard to concentrate).  Maybe I just don’t do well in Hotels.  Maybe it’s just suburban Austin (crowded as shit and less comfortable than home).

Nah.  It’s a fucked-up rotation thing.  Messing up my routine depresses the hell out of me. Depression = 0 motivation. I miss my kids, I miss wife.  All I want to do is glut myself on sleep and blow shit up on the playstation.

It all boils down to the Chi you get from a meaningful, well balanced schedule.  Even if it seems cumbersome at times.  At the risk of sounding boring, I like having everything regular and well oiled.  I get all cagey if you move things around.

Or maybe it’s just that regular life is just that nice.  Think about it, I started this whole blog out by talking about how good things are.  Maybe that’s why changing the schedule is depressing.  Because life really is pretty damn good.

So what happens when I radically change my schedule to ride across the country?  I can’t afford to go all dark.  I’ve got some 450-mile days and I really need to keep the schedule.  This shit is a stretch.  I need to be up and peppy with a badass outlook on life.  Here is the beautifully conventional way I’ll do it:  Create routine.

I’ll even write it all down.  “Here is the list for arriving at camp.  Here is the list for packing up in the morning.”  One of my favorite parts of flight training was the lists.  There are friggin’ lists for everything.  There is even a goddamn list of all the lists you are supposed to have with you whenever you fly. 

Will checklists be enough to cure “routine-interruption sickness”?  I’m not sure but it is certainly worth a shot.

I Have Reservations (not really)

In no particular order and with no sense of singular purpose, here is what’s going on.

Reservations.  Did you catch that?  Reservations.  Every day of this last week and running through my head all the time. Book the hotels.  Book the flights.  Book the bike trailer for the return trip.  Book parking at the Miami airport for the truck and trailer so they are waiting patiently when J drags the children off the plane.  Oh, and book the state parks too…and the Disney portion.

For this trip, there are 17 nights worth of lodging, 4 flights, one trailer and one long term parking spot.  I figure I’m about 1/3 the way booked for the trip.  The research on all these places is done.  Now I just need to book them all.  It’s going to take a couple of weeks.  

There is also some mental pressure going on here.  There is only 3 months left and booking things makes the trip real…or realer than it was when it was all in spreadsheet.

So yeah, reservations.

Bike Tech.  Since the last ride, the bike has been upgraded in the following ways:

• Sheepskin seat cover (looks pimp but that’s not the point)
• Windshield the size of a screen door (does not look pimp but is quickly removable with quick release mounting hardware-take 5 seconds to pull off the whole thing)
• Plexiglass hand protectors for each hand
• Bigger drybag so packing up won’t take 3 hours (its black and awfully fashionable)

Essentially, every aspect of the bike has changed.  I rode it the other night.  It was too damn cold to spend much time at highway speed but it felt completely different.  Better wind protection on the shoulders and head but a ton of wind now on the legs.  The bike is also a little squirrelly but I think that has more to do with my tension than actual performance. 

Still, I need to log some time above 70 to test all this out.  If there are delays on the trip, I may have to do long sessions above 70 MPH to get back on track…or else I might lose one of the 503 reservations noted above.

Documentation.  How to tell the story?  This blog has a small, yet very distinguished readership.  I doubt very seriously that any media I put on it will lead to an Oprah interview (hopefully), but maybe in 20 years the kids will want to understand what I was thinking.  Or see how we really dressed.  Or see how Dad looked before his face turned into dried leather (relatively speaking of course).

Here is what I decided:

• Daily video report to the J and the kids:  I’ll just video myself talking about the day and how much I miss them.  I’ll edit in some pics from that day’s ride.  I’ll end each video with a fun fact about Disney and picture of one of the parks.  This should get them good and excited for that trip.
• Daily Blogposts:  These will be in roughly the same format as the last ride report.  I promise less text and more pictures.  Unless I have something terribly witty, insightful or profane to say.
• Daily Video Diary:  Just a stream-of-consciousness recording for a couple of minutes a day.  This is mainly for the kids to watch when they get older.  Not sure if it will make it to the blog or not.  I just don’t think it will be all that compelling.
• I have some other ideas but I want to hold off on those for now. 

Videos huh?  Crap.  That means I need to look into a laptop to take on the trip…but that’s okay because I can use it to update….Reservations.

Trip Update and the Tyranny of Too Much Lead Time

The only constant is change.  There have been times throughout this process, most of the time actually, that I was ready to say “To hell with this prep and waiting bullshit, I’m leaving tomorrow.”  Reality quickly intervenes and I’m reminded of the magnitude of this trip.  Lets recap, shall we?

Total Trip time of 14 days. 

The first seven days will consist of me riding from my driveway, down to the southernmost tip of the Texas coastline and then all the way to the southernmost tip of Florida (Key West) using only coastal roads. 

The second seven days involves a family trip to Disney World and leisurely drive across the south to get back home.

There is also a quick pretrip drive from Houston to Miami to drop off the truck for the family trip.  This will take place the week before I leave for South Padre Island (southernmost(ish) tip of Texas).

This is not something you put together overnight.  Like any big endeavor, you break into smaller pieces, schedule it all out and knock out the challenges one by one.  It doesn’t matter whether you’re going to Key West or the friggin’ moon, this is the way you do it.

I’ve been at it for about 7 months now. Gathering and testing the gear, making the modifications to the bike, researching lodgings for the ride and the family trip.  All the individual, little pieces.

Last month I did a quick overnight camping ride to practice some techniques.  A good bit of the ride was along a coastal stretch of highway.  Every two minutes or so, the fun part of my brain would say “WE’RE GOIN TO FLORIDA”.  Then it would demand that I turn the goddamn bike back to the east and ride until New Orleans.  After all, I had all the gear on the bike.  I could have logistically done it.  That’s when I knew that I would never make it to next fall.

Thus, in a discussion with J later that week, the trip moved from September to April.  I bumped this trip up 4 months.  In all the projects I’ve managed and worked on, I have never seen, nor heard of a project that retained the original scope, yet shaved 40% off of the schedule. 

My cousin is in the 82^nd airborne (US Army).  Within a couple of years of enlisting, he finished medic training, was promoted multiple times and made it into the 82^nd.  When I asked him how he accomplished all of that so quickly, he shrugged and said “We have a saying, shit happens when you’re motivated”.  It does, It has.

Still, while riding in the sunshine with water on both sides of the road, you don’t think about the prep work.  You forget the hours of planning, the endless wrenchwork and all the research.  From the top of the mountain you don’t think about the climb, you think about the view.

As usual, my wife cleared my vision a bit.  “This is the biggest thing you’ve ever planned and I’ve never known anyone else that took on something like this.”  It was both a nice thing for her to say and something I really needed to hear.  The message I took away is, don’t take this lightly just because the planning has gone so well, so far.  Give yourself credit and don’t underestimate this trip or it will kick your ass, especially with the schedule change. 

She also seemed genuinely excited about the trip.  Seeing it laid out, day by day on the computer screen made it real.  She began to see the enormity of the logistics and how everything was fitting together.  Ironically, she is behind most of the refinements to the schedule.  But the point is, seeing it through her eyes made it new for me again.

So much has changed.  Remember when I wanted to book passage back to Houston on a freighter?  (I still want to do that someday)  Yet, almost all the change has been for the better.  We have had some unpleasant surprises but everyone is healthy and we’re still doing pretty good.   

Don’t get me wrong, this trip is still risky.  Bad shit can happen quick on a bike.  Bad shit can happen on a camping trip, or the highway or at a rest stop.  Forgetting the big stuff, there will be little problems along the way.  Little problems can add up and become big.  Mechanical problems can force delays.  An accident or injury changes things dramatically.

Change is the only constant.  But we change to adapt.  I know I have.  Despite all of the risks, you just get to a point where you’re ready to go.  I’m almost there.  I have until late March to finish up but I distinctly feel like it will be too much time.  It can’t come soon enough.