I think a North/Soith ride would be pretty neat to shake things up.
He may not have been working on the new venture on DMR time, but he likely wasn't putting full effort into RAGBRAI knowing they were wanting to get this new deal started. Pure speculation, but logical.
I'm betting if the DMR sticks to their guns and plans to hold RAGBRAI the same week at this new ride the Iowa DOT and State Patrol are going to be in a tough spot where they may have to choose a side. They still have to get approval of a route and resources to make it happen and I can't imagine they will want to stretch their resources thin on opposite sides of the state for a whole week at the same time. Someone is either going to be told no or they have to change their dates.
I just don't see how the DMR comes out of this a winner regardless what they do. If they sue and try to keep their event alive then essentially they are going against their own PR advice of "letting this situation blow over" because they would now be keeping this in the public spotlight as it plays out in the legal system. If they win with all the reputation damage that has been done how popular will RAGBRAI still be when the now former director says it was already on shaky ground before this? Then if they just let it go and chalk this up as a no-win situation they admit defeat too.
Again, this whole situation and all the PR fires that have come with it would have never happened if they never ran bit about Carson's old tweets and they could have saved face had they just apologized after the backlash they received after they did. It doesn't matter if they think they were still right to publish that, we've all probably had to apologize for something at some point in our lives we felt we were right about but needed to issue the apology so we could forgive and move on and that is exactly what the DMR needed to do instead of continuing to defend themselves and basically sweeping the backlash under the rug hoping it all just blows over. TJ basically just pulled the band-aid off the wound with this announcement and now it's bleeding again. Does the DMR finally take steps to let the wound start healing or just put another band-aid on it and hope no one else picks at the wound some more?