A Day Off??

The day was going to be complicated one way or the other. Knowing that I'd have to be driving up to Baton Rouge with The Wife and her sister from Dallas for some family stuff that had already gone awry, I was determined to get in my morning training ride regardless of the weather. At least I had no trouble waking up in time, thanks to the multitude of garbage trucks that started making the rounds outside around 5 am. I had taken the day off from work in order to accompany The Wife to B.R. for some sort of hearing involving her mother, but something had gone wrong with the plan and the night before we learned it wouldn't happen, so we had to drop back to Plan B that involved mostly taking the sister-in-law around to visit her mother and other relatives. Yeah, I know that sounds like fun, right? So anyway, the temperature had been dropping all night and by morning it was around 40F and the north wind was advertised as 20 mph, gusting to 30. I put the Pearl vest on over the Kodiak jersey with a short sleeve jersey underneath it all. It was a good call.

Apparently a number of the usual krewe decided to take a day off. At the start it was just John, Ronnie, and me. From a distance, Ronnie looked more like a scuba diver in a wet suit than a bike rider! Somewhere around the country club, where we enjoyed the last of the taliwind, we picked up Taylor. Much of the ride today was in a strong crosswind that caused the our four-man eschelon to consume the full width of the bike path. As expected, the trip back was no easier than the trip out, but fortunately we weren't exactly going all-out either. There were a few times when a gust of wind would push me over by a foot or so, but most of the time it felt more like a long steady climb.