Horses and Hurricanes

I wish I could say it felt cooler this morning, but I can't. It was pretty hot and humid with a pretty good wind out of the ESE. The combination of the wind direction and the winding river kept the paceline rather confused as the crosswind kept shifting from one side to the other. All of the rain from Tropical Depression Erin seems to have missed us, unfortunately.

This morning we had a new rider on an Orbea, John, who just moved here from Baton Rouge with his brother who is starting grad school at Tulane in ChemE. The groups started off kind of fast today with Brooks and Chad leading the way. We must have arrived at the playground a bit earlier than usual because apparently Donald missed us. I remember looking over to my right down Central Avenue as we passed to see if he was there, but I must have missed him. So with Brooks and Max and Chad kind of pushing the pace with a little tailwind, we were rolling pretty fast on the way out, but the group was smallish today so mostly everyone was taking pulls of one sort or the other. I was feeling really lousy on the bike for some reason. Every time I'd take a pull my legs would load up after thirty pedal strokes and so I wasn't staying on the front very long.

So we arrive at the turnaround and start heading back and after a mile or so we see Donald hammering up the bike path toward us. I think he gave us all the finger and kept going. A little while later (we were still going pretty slowly) Jeff looked back and said that Donald was chasing behind us, so we eased up a bit more to wait for him. Shortly thereafter he came blasting past us on the left and rode off into the sunrise. We looked around at each other thinking WTF?? Oh well. Whatever. So eventually we got rolling again with Max and Ronnie taking long pulls, and the last eight or ten miles felt pretty hard to me as we rode back down the river into a headwind. When I got home I made up for my lousy ride by eating twice as much for breakfast as usual. By the time I'd checked my email and was ready to ride to work it was already hot and sunny, and I was running about half an hour late. Not that it mattered much since my entire office is out today for one reason or another. Just as well, since I needed to finish up the $3.4M Dept. of Ed. Hurricane Education Recovery Award application and give the Office of Research the OK to officially submit it.

A couple of blocks from my downtown New Orleans office I stopped at a traffic signal and noticed this guy who was carrying a flag and riding a horse down South Claiborne Avenue, with a little donkey in tow. They stopped at the light and I just had to dig out my camera for that one. What on earth was this guy, who by the way was wearing full leather chaps, doing? I suppose I was supposed to recognize the flag? I didn't.

Meanwhile, we have Hurricane Dean heading straight for the Gulf of Mexico and none of the forecasters are making any promises past three days. The computer models are all still indicating it will stay well south of the city, but seeing as how it will be in the middle of the Gulf within a week of Katrina's 2-year anniversary, it's kind of making me nervous. The predicted tracks of these things just almost always seem to show them farther south and west than they end up.