Best Laid Plans.....

It's hard to believe that BRAG is coming up in less than a month. This will be the nineteenth consecutive year that I've ridden across Georgia on a bicycle. Almost all of those years I've done the entire ride. I had to miss most of 2004 because I was in graduate school, but I managed to ride the first day and the last day. We missed a large portion of last year because I was teaching summer school online. I think once we came home a day early. When you've been to one end-of-the-road party, you've been to them all.

Katydid and I haven't trained, but we've done BRAG lots of times with little or no training. I will be off work for almost two whole weeks before the ride this year, but one of those will be spent on a cruise. At least I'll be rested for the ride.

We had planned to take the motorhome on BRAG this year. We had two possible drivers to move it from one overnight stop to the next one along the route, and all we had to do was ride our bike to the next town.

Neither of those possible drivers can do it. So we are left with these choices:

• Go back to tent camping. Not a good choice because I need electricity for my breathing machine.
• Camp indoors. We've done this one before, but it's like sleeping in the same bed with a thousand of your closest friends. You hear all of their noises. And they hear yours. It also tends to be hot, even when it's advertised as air conditioned. Those thousand people make a lot of hot air.
  
• Go to motels. This has been our favorite option for the last couple of years. It takes us away from most of the action around camp, however, and sometimes there are logistical issues with getting us and our gear to the motel and back the next morning. Plus, it's expensive, and sometimes even if you have a reservation you find out when you get there that you don't have a room.
  
• Drive the RV ourselves to the next town each morning, then backtrack on the day's cycling route to about the halfway point, then follow the route back in. We wouldn't have hook-ups for electricity or water, but the motorhome has a generator, so I should be able to use my breathing machine. Oh, and air conditioning. This one has a wimp/cheater's escape clause, too. Since we are basically doing out-and-back rides every day, we get to choose how far we want to ride.
  

We will just have to sit down and weigh all the pros and cons.