Plan B

When you’re flying by the seat of your pants, nothing sounds better than a Plan B.

The Balladeer, The Dukes of Hazzard

About that job Trisha had… Yes, had. Not anymore. Suffice it to stay that she’s almost wasted a month of her time in training, and we’ve wasted two weeks orbiting around the southeast heat in June when we could and should have been heading north already. They jerked her around, gave her a bum deal, which she refused, and they voided her contract.

So, we no longer have a reason to go to, or hang around the area for, Bainbridge. It’ll still be worth checking out at some point, as well as Pensacola, most likely as we cruise back into Florida for the winter from wherever we go after the races in New England. Maybe the sting of what could’ve been will sting a bit less with the passage of time.

Instead, we went north. A few hours north. It’s not the fault of southern Georgia and the Florida panhandle, but it felt good to ragequit the area that we’d been wasting our time orbiting for this job and put it a few hundred miles behind us. Once again, the great thing about van life is that if you have a problem, you can simply drive away from it. Rather than Plan B, we decided on Plan D. D is for Dragon, as in the Tail of the Dragon, a road on the border of Tennessee and North Carolina with 318 curves in 11 miles. No, we’re not drifting the van through it, but it’s a bucket list motorcycle ride, and it’s easy to make it on our way to New England, so that’s our new goal. We’ll make our way there for this weekend, when it won’t matter if I’m out of cell range for work, and I’ll be able to spend an entire day riding around. The entire area is filled with roads that look like a toddler scribbled all over the map. I haven’t gotten any motorcycling in while we’ve been wasting time waiting for the job that never happened, so a day on the bike will do my brain a lot of good.

After the Dragon, we’ll be heading to the Blue Ridge Parkway. It begins not far away from the Dragon, so that’s how we’ll cover another 500 or so miles back toward the northeast. I’ve only been there once, as a kid on a drive to Florida to visit my grandparents. All I remember is not being able to see past the hood of my dad’s 1976 Pontiac Grand LeMans, doing 25mph with the flashers on. It’s worth giving it another shot, especially since I’ve heard people raving about the beautiful views. It’s a slow road, which isn’t so great for motorcycle riding, but it’ll be perfectly fine for the van, and better than the relative autobahns of the southeast.

The silver lining to this story is because the job is gone, we will no longer be spending two weeks stationary while she works a job before we reach New England. We lost two weeks of travel time, but now we have it back, and are amazingly back on schedule. I don’t know where we’ll go after the Blue Ridge Parkway. Right now, I don’t care. All I care about is that we finally have control of our travels again. The cost is unfortunate, though.