Fall Reminder

"Still, New Orleans survives, and these days it serves its oysters Rockefeller and its bananas Foster, its beignets and its gumbo, with smiling, heartfelt thanks for your visit. " (NY Times, R.W. Apple Jr.)
Thanks for the heads-up on this one, Joey!

Here's a photo I took today from the roof showing Tulane Med school in the lower-left. The large building on the right is Charity Hospital - completely closed since Katrina. Hidden behind Charity is the VA hospital - still closed. Half of the Med School building and all of the research building have been pretty much fully functional for a few months now. The tall buildings in the background are office buildings along Poydras, across from the Superdome where you can see the ongoing roof work. Click the photo to see a few more photos showing Canal St., the French Quarter, and a view toward the northeast showing the housing development, I-10, and Lake Pontchartrain. There's still a fair amount of blue plastic out there on the roofs.

The predicted cool front came through last night as we were sitting out on the little front porch of "Iris," a tiny little restaurant just off of Carrollton Avenue on Jeannette along the still-unused streetcar tracks leading to the car barn. We arrived a bit after 7 p.m., and the three of us went through two bottles of wine by the time we were done around 9:30 or so. Iris is a "post-Katrina" restaurant. Everything in New Orleans is defined as either "pre-Katrina" or "post-Katrina" nowadays. The cold Gazpacho with calamari was excellent, fragrant and tasty with a drizzle of olive oil floating on top exactly as I like it. Although it's tiny and crowded, this place gets two thumbs-up from me.

I awoke this morning, a little groggy from the prior evening's repast, to find much cooler and drier weather than we've had lately. That was the up-side. The down-side was that the wind was blowing out of the northwest like a hurricane. I hit the levee meeting spot right on time and the place was deserted, so I rolled slowly upriver toward the playground contemplating my options. Rob wizzed past from the other direction with the wind at this back, then Donald and Ronnie showed up and turned around to join me. Eventually we accumulated about a half-dozen. Todd was on his TT bike and spent the whole time hovering just off the tail end of the paceline where he could regulate his effort without interfering with the pace. It was a hard ride with gusty crosswinds blowing us around much of the time. We turned around early today, at the dip. On a day like this it would have easily taken us an extra ten minutes to ride the whole distance. Even the trip back from the turnaround seemed largely into the wind except for that one stretch from Williams down to the country club where the river runs more southerly. It was there that Ronnie got on the front and pulled for a mile or two at 34-35 mph steady. That ended abruptly, though when we made the bend at the country club and dropped down to 21 mph with the wind in our faces. Riding to work on the commuter I could still feel the morning's ride in my legs.

Today's team time trial at the Giro was hotly contested and super fast. CSC won by just one second with an average speed of 56.8 kph. In yankee language that works out to something like 35 mph. - Average. On my best day I probably couldn't hang onto the tail end of that tiger for more than two minutes.