Morning on the Levee

I met Mark D. and Joe F. out on the Levee bike path this morning, and as always talk centered around the recovery, who was moving where, what was open and what was not. Mark was on his TT bike, since his regular road bike is a temporary resident of Houston until his company moves everything back to N.O. We rode about 30 miles and somewhere along the way I guess I decided to go ahead and plan on making the Saturday Giro ride out on the lakefront. On the way back my front tire sounded like it exploded. There was a loud hiss - hiss - hiss, and I stopped expecting the tire to be flat within the minute. Very strangely, however, it kind of sealed itself with maybe 50 psi left and I was able to ride the last 5 or 6 miles without a problem. Definitely wierd.

The Wife headed off to the airport before noon after telling me that her sister would be staying at our house starting tomorrow. Her house was badly flooded and it will be quite a while before it is habitable again.

I stopped in at Adam's Bicycle World, currently located in part of Chad's Oasis Horticultural building, to say hello to Adam and Mark. Adam showed me a stack of flooded bikes, most still in the boxes. It was sad. I was rather shocked to see how much damage the immersion had done to some of the bikes. The aluminum in particular seemed to be in bad shape. He said that in some cases you could snap off the frame braze-ons with your fingers. This was apparently not nice, clean water. It was the somewhat brackish water from the lake and the salts played havoc with the aluminum and steel. To make matters worse, after being under water for days, it was a long time before anything could be done, so there was a lot of time for the corrosion to really take hold. Anyway, they were quite busy cleaning up costomers' bikes that had been flooded and working on remodeling the space to make a nice bike shop out of it.

So tomorrow I'll do the Giro ride, and then I guess I'll be moving salvaged stuff from The Wife's sister into the basement for storage.