Red Sky at Morning

It is still too dark at 6 am to leave the lights at home, but the hint of dawn does make it a little bit easier to get out the door. Last night around 9:30 as I was working on the laptop I kept hearing voices outside. Since we live near a fairly busy intersection in an old house, that isn't really unusual at all, but after the odd noises continued for a while I finally got up to have a look. Surprise! The New Orleans Police Department had set up one of their night time "checkpoints" on South Claiborne Avenue behind my house. There were six or seven police cars, a big mobile police station and DWI testing trailer, etc. The whole works. As drivers would come around the bend in the road they would be funneled into the checkpoint, leaving no way to escape. In the three or four hours they were there, there was a steady stream of cars pulled off to the side getting ticketed, or worse, for some infraction or another. Typically, these things net a few people for whom there are outstanding arrest warrants, a few drunk drivers, and miscellaneous other people who don't have liability insurance or brake tags or driver's licenses. But I digress...



So it was even warmer today - the temperature on departure was above 50F - and as approached the streetcar barn on Willow I could see that there was an entire movie film crew set up there. The road was closed (of course I rode right through it all on the bike) and the catering truck was already setting up for breakfast. Those movie people really do eat well! We had a nice-sized group for the Thursday long levee ride - I guess a dozen or so - and the pace stayed pretty brisk the whole way. I think my legs were not quite recovered from the day before, because they felt heavy and sluggish whenever I would try to put a little extra pressure on the pedals.



The wind was strange today. I guess it was coming from the northeast, and with the way the river curves, the crosswind kept switching sides on us. It would always take the guy in the lead a long time to figure it out, though, and at one point Donald planted himself on the front for a few miles and everyone who was more than five riders back was lined up along the right edge of the road without any protection. In a crosswind, you are never doing the guys at the back a favor by staying on the front. All that does it keep them from getting a draft longer. Better to keep the rotation going so that the people at the back are only without a good draft for a few pulls until they move up enough to where they can eschelon. For a little while we actually set up a second eschelon, but those never seem to survive very long.



At the turnaround I just had to pull out the camera to try and get a photo of the barge on the foggy river. Then I turned around that there was this great morning sky that, of course, never really comes out right in a photo.