“Happy Father’s Day.... Now drive the truck.”

Well, I survived the move from Shelby to Wake Forest. Not that I enjoyed it, mind you, but given the two options of survival or un-survival, I think I came out ahead.

And I couldn’t have done it without a little help from my friends, including The Star’s managing editor, Alan, the webmaster, Chad, a newspaper buddy of mine in Wake Forest named Nate and Joe, who had car trouble but was there in spirit. More on the blog: jderrickstar.blogspot.com….

And of course my parents were there. My Dad even got to help on Father’s Day – “Happy Father’s Day,” read the card, “Now drive the truck.”

All the planning and worrying I invested in the project paid off. As my scoutmaster used to say:
to fail to plan is to plan to fail.

This mantra is especially relevant in the great outdoors, where help is not always near and sometimes Walmart is a long way away.

And now, to illustrate the importance of planning in life and the outdoors, is our very own, newly unemployed and law school-bound, John Derrick.

For instance, don’t go riding a broken down bicycle across Germany, France, Switzerland, Austria and Liechtenstein without a tent, sleeping bag, long pants or even shorts with a zipper that will stay up. This may sound like something that would never happen to anybody, but trust me it has.

Secondly, you can’t live on beer and chocolate forever. But it is fun to try.

For my recent move from Shelby I had months to plan, gather boxes, organize labor…. Moving to Shelby a few years ago, I’d taken the job on a Thursday afternoon and was in town the next Monday at lunchtime living out of the Econo Lodge while I looked for an apartment.

That was moving a little quicker than I generally like to, but it worked. There is a flip side to the importance of planning – the importance of flexibility. “All planning is bunk on first contact,” I’ve heard. So when I had to go to York, SC, last Friday to pick up the U-Haul I’d reserved weeks in advance to pick up in Shelby I was able to catch a ride with Chad who was heading kinda that way anyway. I guess that was flexibility.

Or that time when a UNC-Chapel Hill camping group headed to Asheville kinda missed the I-40/I-85 split somewhere up near Greensboro, and didn’t notice their mistake until South Carolina and then had to figure out an alternate route. That was stupidity and poor navigation, but there was some flexibility in there too.

That was the vehicle I wasn’t in.

So maybe it’s kind of a balancing act between the nebulous, fluid flexibility and hard, rigid planning – often neither way is the right approach and the best strategy is somewhere in the middle.

And remember, just because your Army ROTC unit didn’t explicitly tell you to pack something for a field training exercise didn’t mean they didn’t want you to bring it. Maybe they just thought nobody would need to be reminded to bring un… ummm….
Nevermind.

By the way, the best email address to reach me at right now is probably jderrick@alumni.unc.edu....