As I stare open mouthed at the calendar I ask myself, How in
the hell could this have happened?
I begin the big ride 3 weeks from this Friday. Aside from a bunch of little stuff that has
to be done closer to departure, I have two very large maintenance items that
must be done before I leave.
The truck that will carry us all home desperately needs some
maintenance. Its timing-belt time and I
really haven’t kept up with the maintenance in my overly protective way. Thus, the laundry list is long and I would
imagine that it will take the shop at least a week to do the work. That means that the motorcycle becomes my
primary mode of transport. No problem, I
did it in College and even more recently when my truck was in the shop a few
weeks ago. In fact, one of the reasons I
have the bike is because a third vehicle is just a really handy damn thing to
have. Here is the Problem:
Weeks left to trip: 3.
Here is how it lays out:
Week 1(April 1-5):
Armada in the shop all week. Hopefully
we are done with Spring cold fronts because 38 degrees on a bike just sucks.
Week 2 (April 8-12): Bike in the shop for new brakes and a problem
with the starter. Now as any bike owner
will tell you, turnaround times are very different between bikes and cars. It is not uncommon for a bike to be in the
shop for two weeks for repairs. I just
don’t freakin’ have it. At the end of
week 2, I need to drive the Armada and bike trailer to Miami (I’ll fly back). That means that I would need to have the bike
by Monday morning of week 3 at the latest.
Week 3 (April 15-19): No Armada (it’s in Miami waiting for J and
the kids). Thus I am a full time
motorcyclist again this week. This
actually works out very well because I can shake out the problems before
heading south on the 19th.
So on paper, everything looks fine. But life is not lived on paper. As a project manager, I see huge amounts of
risk in this approach. Very little would
be needed to completely screw my schedule.
How the shit did this happen?
Thinking back, I lost over a week to fever and bronchitis. You can’t avoid that but I could have built
slack into the schedule for it. I
noticed that the bike brakes were squeeking and it is getting hard to start. I
was hoping that I could get through the trip with the bike as-is but I just don’t
feel comfortable with it. I have to ride
a total of about 2300 miles in 7 days with the bike pretty well loaded. I
should have anticipated this.
All in all, I think the answer is “Life happened”.
The kids had spring break. We had a ton of work done on the
house. I only have about 8 concurrent
projects at work and most of them are behind.
You just can’t compartmentalize life.
It doesn’t break down into family, work, house, cars, trip. It all gets mixed into one big bowl of tasks
and goals. I’m good at making sure that
the important things rise to the top. J
and the kids followed by work and then progressing onward to cars bikes and
houses. Still, the damn bowl overflows
sometimes and there isn’t shit you can do about it. Lesson learned.
Now then, how do we address the risk of bike work and
schedule? My bike shop is pretty
good. If they can’t finish the work by
my deadline, they’ll at least tell me.
That means I should know about the bike status before I leave to drop
the truck off in Miami. I doubt very
seriously that it will take these guys two weeks to fix a starter and swap out
some brakes. I could do it myself if I
had about 20 extra hours. I guess the
worst case scenario then is that I might have to rent a cheap car while they
finish the bike. It sucks but it’s
really only a hundred bucks or so. I can
absorb it in the trip budget. In any
case, it’s a back-up plan.
I’m doing one last training ride up to Lake Sommerville this
weekend to shake out gear. Everything
else looks pretty good.
Funny how I always feel better about these things once I
write them down. When you drag things
into the light, they usually just aren’t that frightening. And it’s important to remember how cool this
trip will be…in three short weeks.
