How Getting Back On Track Started
Once upon a time, there was a boy and a girl and they fell in love, got married, had a bouncing baby boy and started a grand adventure…
Back in 2006, I was a “skydiver driver”, as we were called. A pilot in command of an aircraft responsible for taking crazy risk takers up to altitudes, switching on a little green light and watching them all fall out of the plane, just to go back down to the ground and pick up more and do it again. Not sure what they say now, but back then if you asked them why jump out of a perfectly good airplane, the overwhelming response was, “the door was open.” My response as a pilot was, “well the plane is not perfectly good.” as I point out some duct tape here and there. The plane was, in fact, perfectly good and tape was used just to make the first time jumpers nervous. I don’t need the NTSB coming after me for an interview about this “duct tape”.
Anyway, in 2006, I was in charge of a Cessna Caravan, and a contracted pilot for the owner. Owner one day called me up, while I was living in AZ, and said I needed to get out to Skydive Santa Barbara because they needed a pilot. Back in 2006, I didn’t have a ‘smart’ phone so I had to actually use a computer and MapQuest to get my directions. I stayed up late the night before I headed out and hit the road early. My first mistake. I hit the road for an eight hour drive out to what I thought was Santa Barbara. I had my portable DVD player on the passenger side showing ‘EuroTrip’ (Yes, Scotty Doesn’t Know) and doing my best not to fall asleep at the wheel. I found out that Santa Barbara was not the destination but had to keep going, another hour, on an almost empty tank of energy (and gas) to a little town in the elbow of California, called Lompoc. Famously mispronounced in the first ‘The Fast and The Furious’ franchise, it’s pronounced Lohm-poke. You say poc like pock and you will get chased out of the town, or put in the Federal Prison there.
I parked at the drop zone and wandered into the hangar, where a, fairly attractive, lady was at the front desk and managed to mumble, “I think I’m your new pilot.” THinking I was going to go through introductions and then find my living place and crash for the rest of the day, she says, “great, we’ve been waiting for you!” Huh? I just drove eight hours and I’m dead tired, and you want me to fly!? Let’s do this! I probably flew a dozen loads that day and then they took me out to dinner. If you ask Jamie to this day, she will say that this new pilot was a jerk, standoffish and unfriendly. I was just really, really tired.
Next day, I was a little more chipper and rested and ready to fly. Jamie was the attractive, young lady at the front desk and over the next week, we really hit it off. Our first “date” was May 19th, where I had intended to get a group together to go bowling but it just ended up being Jamie and me. That summer was a whirlwind and went by so fast. Jamie and I fell in love and then came the time that I had to go back to AZ to pilot a Caravan back at my home drop zone. After some hemming and hawing, I asked Jamie if she would move back to AZ with me and she said yes.
We got married on May 19th, 2009 and the plan began to form. We initally talked about saving money and then backpacking all over Europe, living in hostels, riding trains and seeing the world. Sounds like a good dream, but for right now, we can barely afford the house we bought. Let’s find jobs and we can make this our five to ten year plan. I had gone from being a “diver driver” to a “desk jockey”, working at a new bank in AZ. My dad worked for a bank, how hard can that be? Set schedule, no long hours, and PAID TIME OFF. SOmething I had never heard of, but loved! Jamie got a job working at an insurance company, and to this day, I still have no idea what her job was. At one point it had to do with hurricanes, and then something called product development.
When the five years rolled by, I had moved my way up to managing a branch location, and Jamie had moved up as well. In 2014, William was born, but the idea of travel was still part of the “five to ten year plan”. In 2019, William started Kindergarten and my mom passed away. I slipped into a state of depression that wouldn’t be sorted out for a few more years, but then 2020 happened and COVID shook the world to its core. During this time, Jamie was stuck working at home and a 6 year old William knew more about Zoom meetings than any child should have had to learn. I was still working at the bank on a modified schedule, so I was in and out of the house. Jamie and William began to go stir crazy, so we used the social distancing as a means for taking road trips. From Phoenix, we would drive to Prescott, Tucson, and Flagstaff and then we started finding the littler known treks like The Apache Trail (a 40-45 mile scenic, and partialy unpaved route through the Superstition Mountains (no, we didn’t locate the Lost Dutchman’s Mine), and we drove to Sheep Bridge, a little more rugged off-road adventure starting up at (I didn’t name it), Bloody Basin Road and ending down in Cave Creek, just north of Phoenix.
Jamie became more interested in other off road adventures, and through Facebook, stumbled on the PanAmerican Highway, a 19,000 mile network of roads stretching from Prudhoe Bay, Alaska down to the southern tip of Argentina. Our EuroTrip was morphing into a RoadTrip. And this time Scotty did know. We started saving and researching (well Jamie researched mostly) and came up with the plan. We planned that, when William started middle school, grades 7 and 8, would be the perfect opportunity to make our, once dream, become a reality. This was finally going to be the time we could say, “WeirbackOnTrack.”
Now, how do we make that happen?…
