Published on July 6, 2024 2:20 AM GMT
I recently finished a nine-dayroad trip, playing a series of dances. This combined driving longdistances with arrival deadlines: you don't want to arrivelate. Not only is it unprofessional, but it's stressful rushing toset up and you'll likely have a bad night from skipping some nice-to-havesteps. A concept I found pretty useful was thinking about allocating"buffer".
Let's say it's 8am in Pittsburgh PA and the hall in Bloomington IAopens for setup at 5:30pm. GPS says its a 6.5hr drive, so we have 3hrof buffer to spend. Some of the buffer we'll need to spend stoppingfor gas and restrooms. We might choose to spend additional buffer ona relaxed breakfast, stopping at interesting places along the way, orexploring Bloomington. Or we might be unlucky with traffic (or,heaven forfend, the car) and lose some buffer to bad luck.
Since the risk of things going wrong or taking longer than you expectis roughly proportional to distance, it's pretty risky to front-loadyour buffer consumption. You don't want to spend all by 30min earlyon and then run into a 1hr traffic jam. But the most enjoyable waysof spending buffer are probably distributed along the route, so thesafest option of reserving it all for the destination isn't verypleasant. It's much nicer to spend the marginal half hour with yourtoes in a shady stream than waiting around in the parking lot outsidethe hall.
While this was somewhat useful in my own planning, the place where itreally demonstrated its value was in talking with mytourmates. Getting close to the hall I might ask if anyone hadanything they wanted to spend buffer on; playing at a park I could useit to explain to my kids why we should leave soon; it avoided peoplemistaking the GPS arrival time for our actual arrival; any proposedactivity had a nice currency for considering its cost.
I don't remember thinking about this explicitly on past tours, ormissing it before. I think the main reason is that we scheduled thistour much more tightly. On days when we had a lot of driving we stillwanted to take nice breaks (one park had a seriouszipline and a 90ft slide) and on days when we had less driving wedid a lot of seeing things (boating on an undergroundriver). I expect it to continue to be rare for me to be in asituation where I need to do this kind of collaborative planningaround a deadline, but when I'm next doing it I think this will be auseful tool.
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