Springtime Weekend

I was up early on Saturday and on the road to Auburn by 6:30 a.m. I had borrowed my mom's Saturn which is only about six months old and was looking forward to a relaxing drive. You can imagine my surprise when I hit the cruise control button about ten miles out and nothing happened. It was dead. Nonfunctional. Broken. I stopped at a gas station to see if perhaps it was something simple - a loose electrical connector or vacuum line, but there was nothing obvious, so I spent the next 5.5 hrs monitoring the speedometer. At least the weather was great and the traffic was thin. The meet went OK, but the Iowa team is really battered this year. There were only nine girls in the lineup out of 13 team members. The rest are injured. The Daughter, in fact, is really too injured to be competing on her ankle, but the team is too thin to spare her right now. I hung around after the meet and went to dinner with the team at the home of the Auburn coach and then The Daughter and I went out for a cup of coffee near campus.

I headed out around 9:30 p.m. and arrived back home around 3 a.m., so I got about three hours of sleep before heading out to the lakefront to meet the Giro ride. When I hit the lakefront I was greeted by a sad sight. A pickup truck whose driver was probably drunk and showing off by driving on the slope of the levee had flipped over on it's side into the parking lot. Apparently one girl was killed.

It was windy this morning but that didn't stop a large group from showing up in the warm weather. On the way out, we cross a drawbridge with a metal grating at the top. It was a little bit wet from the morning dew, so most of the group stopped to walk across - there have been some bad crashes on that thing in the past. Well, a few guys at the front didn't stop and worse yet they didn't wait for the rest of the group to catch up. The rest of us waited for everyone to regroup and by the time we started to chase the lead group was a little speck about a minute and a half up the road. The chase stayed pretty disorganized most of the way out. Every time the pace would get up to 28 or so the chain would break about six riders back and everything would slow down until the stronger guys went back up to the front. Three steps forward; one step back. We did make up some ground, but never caught the lead group that contained Jay, Brett and Noel amoung others. The return trip stayed pretty fast too. I rode back from the lakefront nice and slow!

It is suddently Springtime here in New Orleans! All of the Azaleas and Camelias in my front yard are in full bloom, the temperature is 74F, and there is a nice breeze blowing the oak leaves around. The Live Oaks like the one in front of my house and all along my street are beginning to flower, and when that happens in the Spring the trees drop all of their old Winter leaves. It is practically raining oak leaves today. I swear they drop more leaves in the Spring than in the Fall.

Anyway, I am way overdue for a nap!