Best Laid Schemes...

“The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft a-gley.” The Giro Ride today was a hard one, at least for me. When VJ flatted before we even got off of Lakeshore Drive, most of the group continued rolling while a dozen or so of us waited. So right off the bat we were chasing most of the way down Hayne Blvd. until we finally caught up with the rest of the group. Once everyone was together, we got back into standard Giro mode, which meant a fast paceline and finishing sprint out to the turnaround at Venetian Isles. As the sprint started well ahead of me and far too early, I found myself on Tim's wheel, so I hung on as he smoothly accelerated, passing most of the riders ahead as they burned out one by one. After we turned around, we could see that a lot of riders had turned around early and were now rather far ahead of us already. Tim said something about the reward for a good sprint being the need to chase down those who had turned around early.

Soon enough, though, we found ourselves rolling gradually off the front, the rest of the group content to extend their recovery time. Tim looked over his shoulder at me and said "let's see how long a leash they'll give us." I'll admit, I had mixed feelings here, but as he started to accelerate I stayed with him. We ended up with a small group taking short, fast pulls with Tim cracking the whip and the rest of us too stubborn to give in. I was already starting to skip pulls even before we got off of Chef highway. It was about that time that Tim said "let's not sprint and just keep rolling." Jay didn't hear that one and sprinted, which mainly served increase the pace another notch. Soon we were hammering again. Then, somewhere on the service road, one of the guys on a triathlon bike showed up. He passed us, we passed him, he passed us, I sucked his wheel, and we passed him one last time. About that time we caught up with Todd who stayed with us all the way down Hayne, finally putting in a huge surge just before the bridge that gapped a few of us off. Somehow we got back to Tim's wheel and I stuck on it like glue until we crested the Seabrook bridge, which is the unofficial finish line for the Giro. By then I was pretty well tapped out.

So I hung around the parking lot for a while, expecting to have a pretty free day before going to a 7 pm party, but when I arrived home I was informed that apparently I had been previously informed that we were driving up to Baton Rouge again to help install a dishwasher, move furniture, etc., etc. Well, I thought, that shouldn't take all that long, so my scheme was to get that job done and be back in town in plenty of time for the party. Well, actually, I was again proven wrong. It took a few hours to pull out a vintage 1970's style dishwasher, which had clearly been installed without the benefit of either common sense or an electrician, or, for that matter, a competent home handyman. Then we installed a newer dishwasher that we had removed from another kitchen that had also lacked the input of an electrician (and plumber). So I had a lot of fun cannibalizing parts from one in order to make the other work, which we finally did, although the electrical inspector would probably have a heart attack if he saw it, even though we certainly left the wiring in better shape than we'd found it. After that we had to load up a bunch of furniture and deliver it to one of the relatives outside of Baton Rouge who lives in a mobile home complete with broken down cars and rusting childrens' bikes outside on the grass. After all of that drama I didn't get back home until almost 9 pm.

Anyway, I was glad to see that Contador stuck it out and kept the yellow jersey, and of course Levi's time trial was just a thing of beauty. If nothing surprising happens tomorrow it will have been a truly amazing Tour for the Discovery boys whose original plans certainly didn't include a yellow jersey in Paris, much less two guys on the podium, the team win, the white jersey and three stage wins. Of course, there were a couple of other teams and riders whose plans went rather awry as well this year.