Rising Tide Ride

The Mississippi is really starting to rise around here and there is official talk about opening the Spillway. While there are normally a few hundred yards of batture between the levee and the water, right now the river laps loudly against the concrete levee apron in some places. Looking the other way it's easy to see that the water level is higher than the ceilings in most of the homes along River Road. Farther out you can see the partially submerged willow trees that normally line the river bank. It's definitely a Rising Tide (which is also an interesting book), and they are saying that it won't crest for another week or two. Looks like there might be some whitewater in the spillway soon.

It was much warmer this morning - around 60F - and there were probably a dozen or so riders out on the levee, including Rob and Donald and GiVo (who will be heading back to AZ on Friday). Kenny was supposed to meet us, but he must have been up all night reading LAMBRA e-mails about the Cat. 3 controversy!!

Rob apparently had a meeting this morning and wasn't willing to settle for much less than 23-24 mph. Well of course that didn't last very long and it kind of turned into a race for a while. The group kind of split with I think Rob, GiVo and I rotating in front. The return trip, as usual, was a little more tame, but with a light tailwind we were still going 24-25 most of the time. Right after we turned around Rob took off at a decent pace, but a whole bunch of the group didn't go with him so I guess four or five of us rode just a little bit off the front for a while until everyone caught up. After that, most of the group was sitting in and three or four of us were pulling at a pretty steady pace until we got near the Bridge when Carey started doing his impersonation of The Howard. Naturally, Rob latched onto his wheel, and I onto Rob's while Carey pulled us up to 31 at one point. I was OK with that, but definitely not inclined to come around!

I was really not feeling too quick today for some reason - don't really know why - but it was a good workout anyway. Since we got back a little earlier than usual, I rode down to the park and back with GiVo before heading home. I almost made it, but with only one bumpy block of Pine Street left to go my rear tire went flat. I may have to put a couple of new tires into the budget soon.

Lots of volunteer website work is stacking up. The Brother sent me some updates for his daughter's rowing team's site that I haven't been able to get to yet, and I need to go through the NOBC event calendar and update it according to the results of last weekend's LAMBRA meeting. Somewhere in there I also need to do some actual work around here to see how the university can respond to the most recent BAA from the Department of Homeland Security.