An Empty River

So last night a bunch of us headed over to Cooter Brown's to watch the replay of the day's Alpe d' Huez stage on the big screen. This little get-together had been arranged a couple of weeks earlier by way of the NOBC Yahoogroups list. Someone who knew the owner got the OK for the oh-so-risky maneuver of replacing the regular baseball or basketball or professional wrestling or whatever it is that bar patrons normally watch on those big screens with the Versus coverage of the Tour de France. No doubt they had to look up Versus in the channel guide just for us. Complicating matters for me was that The Wife had invited her sister and niece over for dinner at some point in the afternoon, which meant that I wasn't ready to head over to Cooter's until after I'd grilled a $30 piece of salmon and consumed a couple of glasses of wine. Somewhere around the middle of that second glass Kenny called to say that they wouldn't turn on the sound at Cooter's because it might disturb the other patrons and so he was out of there. So after confirming that indeed we had a lot of the local riders in attendance anyway, I rode down to the riverbend, ordered up a glass of Porter, and had a rather enjoyable couple of hours chatting with everyone and watching the TDF coverage -- without sound. I doubt I could have heard it anyway over all of the talking. The undisturbed "other patrons" amounted to five or six people, all of whom were quite unconcerned with any of the television screens, so I really don't know what the big issue was. All of this, of course, made it a little bit of a challenge to get up this morning, but I did anyway.



The morning ride was pretty fast today with Matt pushing the pace on the way out until, mercifully, Dave had a flat and we all got to stop and drip sweat for a while while he fixed it. It took a few miles after that before the pace really got rolling again, but of course it did. Likewise, the ride back seemed satisfyingly fast and toward the end it was clear that there were more than a few tired legs in the bunch. We even picked up Young Dan at some point, who I presume is in town from Austin for a little visit. His fresh legs were quite welcome over the final few miles of the ride.



So I'm signed up for a new stage race this weekend over in Lafayette where I'm sure I'll get my lunch eaten, but hey, some racing seasons are just like that, especially this one. Meanwhile, here at work, it has been really odd looking out over the empty river all day and seeing not a single ship. It seems a tanker ran over a barge full of oil the other day just upriver from the convention center, splitting it (the barge, not the convention center) in two. The resulting 400,000 gallon oil spill has everything shut down from New Orleans all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico for all practical purposes while they try to clean up the mess that is now spread out over about a hundred miles of river. So there are at least a hundred big ships that are going nowhere right now and that's not a good thing. I think the pilot of the tug boat that was moving the barge is in really deep doo-doo, considering that nobody on board at the time had a pilot's license.