Returning to Normal

It's amazing how the local riders have their arrival times so dialed-in for the morning levee ride. Five minutes before start time and the meeting spot is deserted. Then, within a matter of about 120 seconds, six or seven riders suddenly show up right on cue. This morning I was actually a few minutes early and as I climbed the levee from River Road I looked up to the "pipe hill" and saw only a single rider. Once I was up on the bike path I looked back downriver and just caught the image of a rider wearing an NOBC jersey going the other direction. "Damn," I thought, "That was probably Dustin and he's going to miss us." Sure enough, a couple of minutes after we started, my phone rang. Ordinarily I'd ignore a phone call at 6:40 am, but this time I knew who it would be. Dustin was down at the Audubon Park end of the bike path wondering where everyone was. So I quickly explained the situation and told him to turn around and we'd eventually meet up on our way back from the turnaround.

The river seems to have finally returned to normal. After three solid months of being higher than it's natural bank, it now looks like it's back where it belongs. Also, the river is finally more or less open to normal shipping again following the oil spill last week. That situation is still not quite normal, though. Sitting in my office today I could see a whole swarm of small boats out there across from the CBD doing cleanup and I could also easily make out the areas where there is still oil floating on the water. It's rather amazing that they can do anything at all to clean up oil spilled into such a big and fast-moving river.

So anyway, the Wednesday ride seemed fairly fast today, but the legs felt pretty good and I was happy with it. Back at work later in the morning we sent out a thank-you letter to some of the key people in the House and Senate for their work in getting the Education Disaster Loan provision into the College Opportunity and Affordability Act. This was rather a triumph, actually, and represents a good thing that will come out of Hurricane Katrina and will potentially benefit all universities, so naturally you'll never hear about it on the 10:00 news.

After The Wife was knocked off her bike, possibly intentionally, as she was riding to work on the bike path over the Jefferson Davis Parkway overpass, she wanted to take a different route home today. We ended up taking the long way home riding mostly under the Oak trees along St. Charles Avenue taking in the scenery and making stops at the Post Office and Prytania Street bank along the way. I noticed that The Dark Knight is currently showing at the old Prytania Theatre. Might have to check that out one day soon. Earlier, I just had to take a photo of the awesome scaffolding that had been erected for work on one of the old brick churches on St. Charles. I have spent some significant time on scaffolding hauling up bricks and mortar, but was never higher than maybe twenty feet. There was just no comparison with the complexity of the scaffolding and the sheer height. I've always found scaffolding to be facinating. They're like these giant adult Erector Sets.

So Kenny B. has started rounding up a big crew to go do the Six Gap Century in September. I am seriously hoping I'll be able to finally do this "ride." I'm still kicking myself for missing the chance I had to do it back in 2001 when a few of the local riders went and put a couple of guys into the top ten. Well, they would have been in the top ten if it had been a race, but of course it's just a ride, right? Yeah, right. There's a little problem with a conflicting stage race in Mississippi that had been tentatively rescheduled, but it looks like there is a chance it may move to a different weekend to avoid the conflict since so may of the LAMBRA riders are talking about doing Six Gap this year.