Last Rides

It was a fairly busy weekend. My friend Gina came down from ATL for a couple of days, and in the process I bought her old Al/Carbon Orbea. Since it's got Campi 10, I may finally have to start hunting down some 10 speed parts for the Cervelo so I can avoid complete chaos. The Orbea has kind of a mash-up of parts, so I'm not really sure what I'm going to be doing about all of that, but after riding it seven hours of so I was missing things like my Campi computer but liking things like shifters that actually work. I guess I can detect a slight bit more harshness over the bumps, but that might be more a function of the wheels than the frame. Anyway, it's nice to know somebody who rides the same size frame and always seems to have one or two old team bikes lying around! She's riding for the small JuicePlus team next year and just got a new Van Dessel Rivet that, in the extra-small size and with carbon race wheels, makes a mockery of the increasingly controversial UCI weight limit. So I guess she'll be riding "on the rivet" in more ways than one this year.

So Saturday we went out to the Giro Ride which started out kind of small but ended up with a lot of people. On the way out my rear tire blew rather dramatically. When it went, I felt the shrapnel (or more likely just he air) hit my calf. That boot I'd sewn into it a couple of months ago had started to touch the ground through the hole in the tire and so it had eventually worn through. Luckily I had a piece of Mr. Tuffy in my bag, so I put a boot under the boot and was good to go for the rest of the ride.

Sunday I awoke to the sound of a steady rain. We had planned on doing a long city sightseeing ride, since Gina had not been back to NOLA since the year before Katrina, so we waited until things looked better and set out on the wet streets around 10:30. I was riding the Orbea, so I had a couple of allen wrenches in my pocket and since I was expecting we'd get a little rain, I was rather over-dressed. Luckily, the weather cooperated and we put in 4 or 5 hours riding through the French Quarter, out to Brad Pitt's project in the lower 9th ward, over the Paris Road bridge (aka the "Green Monster"), back to Lakeshore Drive, over to the area where the 17th street canal floodwall had failed, through Metairie cemetery, and finally back to the house.

Even though we were going pretty easy most of the time, by this morning my legs were feeling kind of sore. I probably should have said "no thanks" when someone suggested doing the long ride this morning, but since there was a pretty good-sized group doing it, I figured I'd be OK. It was foggy all the way out and most of the way back up on the levee today, and I would have been fine except for one thing. One of the guys flatted early on the return trip Everybody stopped and waited for him to fix it, but then they kind of took off before he had a chance to get on. John and I saw that he was being left behind, so we eased up to wait, figuring we'd just have to chase for a mile or so to catch up. So we're kind of soft-pedaling along in the fog when John looks back and says "I can't see him." We slow down even more and finally see him emerging from the fog. He'd dropped his chain. By the time the three of us got going again, the group was close to a minute up the road and rolling along at a pretty good clip, apparently unaware that we were missing(??) We ended up doing a 3-man time trial for at least ten miles before finally catching what was left of the group somewhere around the Huey P. Long bridge. My quads were burning every time I'd take a pull, so I wasn't really wasn't helping all that much with the chase. I guess perhaps I can call it a good workout, though.

I guess it's time to dive back into the kitchen project. Only one door frame left to scrape before I can get the sander out.