indyfabz

Just to add one more thing, I think it helps is you can deal with people who you may really dislike. In our group we had an alcoholic bigot. I would have recommended that he be tossed from the tour after his first crash and near arrest for drunk and disorderly in ND.

There was also a guy who always tried to shirk his cooking and cleaning duties, which came around once every week or so. He would do things like take a bag of trash to the dumpster during breakfast and slink off onto the road, leaving his assigned partner to wash the group dishes. This would delay people who carried group gear that was usually used for breakfast and to make lunches for the road since they could pack up until things were cleaned. Other in the group would chip in to take up the slack he left. The other amusing (yet) sad thing he would do involved carrying groceries. If we had to carry groceries to a campground we would wait outside the store while the two people responsible for dinner that night would shop. We they would come out of the store, this guy would rush over to the carts and grab the lightest things he could get his hands on. Things like loaves of bread and bags of tortilla chips, leaving the heavy stuff for the rest of us. Not sure if he knew we all noticed it and thought it was pathetic. One day he complained to the leader that I didn't carry groceries one day because I and another guy had to go off route to a LBS for some repairs. (Seems we got no credit for bringing back a case of beer for everyone.) Another participant overheard him beefing and told me. The next day I reminded him that at the end of the third day of the trip I and two other participants rode 16 mile round trip from camp for groceries for the entire group because our leader mistakenly thought there was a grocery store near by. Petty stuff like that would drive me crazy.