How about a composite flight plan. If you're going to cancel anyway, file IFR to a fix where you're IFR flight plan terminates. Then you have to option of remaining IFR with the controller or canceling to continue to your destination. We used to do this in flight training quite often, especially when we didn't know where our destination was going to be or we strictly wanted to get students in the clouds. If there were IFR near a certain fix at a certain altitude, we'd just file direct to the fix, ask ATC for a block altitude, say 10 miles around the fix and we'd do BAI, etc in actual. When we were done, we'd ask for a lower altitude, cancel, and fly home.