Feather Brained Plans!

Tonight I am sitting in a camper with a space heater and lights, recently showered and only kind of freezing.  This is a vast improvement over the earlier portions of the week.

The Plan:  *Work Saturday night, finish about 5 and head 100 miles to Austin.
*Get some sleep.  Pack the car.
*Sunday evening, leave for Plano to pick up the camper.
*Start driving.  Sleep as needed.  *Drop the camper at a friend's in NC on Tuesday.
*Arrive in NJ for Wednesday.
*Be there for Mom during her surgery on Thursday.  Stay until after Christmas.
*Head to FL whenever the customers start showing.  Pick up the camper along the way.

The reality:  *Help another braider Saturday night and not get done until 11 am.  Drive 100 miles home.  *Sleep 2 hours.  Get up, mainline coffee, throw stuff in car.
*Hit weather on the way to Plano.  Finally arrive at 1 am.
*Learn to hook up camper ad sway bars in pouring rain at 40 degrees and strong wind.
*Learn to drive camper in same conditions.
*Lock up brakes trying to stop.  Notice that brake controller was never installed!
*Stop at a gas station and sleep in car because it is raining too hard to get to camper (which has sprung a leak so the interior is soaked).
*Stop in Bossier City, La and have brake controller installed.
*Travel 50 miles.  Hear engine go BOOM! followed by BoomBoomBoomBoom.
*Call AAA.
*Sit on side of road for hours waiting for a tow truck before they call back to say no one is coming.
*Get rescued by state police.
*Spend night in dark, wet camper in wrecker yard.  Tow truck driver has pity and buys breakfast to be nice.
*Get car repaired.  Empty out bank account.
*Get back on road.  Travel 4 hours until sun starts to go down.
*Notice that the dashboard lights are not working.  Stop at rest area to investigate.  Discover that the entire rig (truck and trailer) is dark.
*Realize thanks to iPhone maps and Google that you are 50 miles from the nearest gas station.  Confirm suspicion with nearby trucker.
*Settle in for a night in the wet camper with no heat (furnace is broken and replaced with space heaters) and no power.  Note that the weather is predicting temps in the 20s.
*In morning, try to figure out where fuse box might be.  Consult owners manual.  Ask for help deciphering owners manual.  Give up.  Call RV place.
*Spend too much money to have a fuse upgraded.
*Continue driving into night.
*Stop for coffee two hours from planned stopping point.  Find out that just ahead there is a weather system.  Note truckers comment "the mountain is WHITE!"
*Do GPS search for nearest KOA.  Follow directions.
*Discover directions are wrong.  Back slowly down the country road to a parking lot big enough to allow a turn around.
*Get back on highway.  See sign for KOA at next exit.  Follow signs.
*Spend an hour trying to figure out why the camper won't get power.  Think of breaker.  Discover it tripped.  Flip breaker.  Get power.
*Blog
*Wonder how the next 800 miles of the trip will go.

You just can't make this stuff up.

Amazing trails and technical difficulties

After leaving the MC Escher trail behind me, I headed up to Virginia for a night.  I got to ride on the W&OD trail near Leesburg.  My Facebook post summed it up...

"Yesterday I got a chance to ride on the W&OD trail. Almost 50 miles one way of two lane bike trail, framed by lush greenery, blooming dogwoods, redbuds, cherries, babbling brooks. I think I died and went to bicycle heaven... Or Virginia, as the case may be."

Then we headed to NC where I rode early one morning in the cold and rain.  I think I meee-e-e-e-lted a little, as any good Florida witch would.  I rode out feeling rather proud of my dedication, ahem (OK, I know people all over the world ride in much worse).  I had also forgotten to put in my contact lenses so in addition to the rain making my brakes sketchy and the mist reducing visibility, my own God-gifted vision left road hazards indistinguishable from puddles.  Sooo... I headed down every hill braking hard and then at the bottoms had to face nasty climbs with no momentum built up.  It was then that I got the memo about fixing that little gearing problem I have encountered in the past.  My chain wouldn't shift onto (and stay on) any of the largest rings in my back cassette.  In other words, no granny gear, not even an aunt Martha gear.  Can you say "push that bike up that hill in freezing rain"?....  yummy. 

When I returned to SC, I rode the Escher Trail again but this time, I was thinking outside the box (and I studied the map).  Somehow, the whole place made sense and I went thirty out of forty-five miles without being lost for a moment.  Around mile 25, I thought the bike handling seemed sluggish, but given the state of the bike, I dismissed it with a quick glance at my tires.  As my heart rate climbed, my speed dropped and no gearing in the world seemed to help.  Then I realized that my back tire, while not apparently popped was holding very little air.  Since I have changed that back tube roughly every thirty miles lately, I just rode home on low pressure and resolved that the bike needed to visit the bike doctor as soon as I got home.

Sure enough, the bike was out of adjustment and the tire was in desperate need of retirement.  So I venture out on the bike again today, and hope that Trigger will be feeling up to a fast, fun ride down the debris littered roads of Sunny South Florida.  Home Sweet Home.