Breakfast Ride

It was a day like we often have for Rocktoberfest -- dramatically cooler and with a strong wind out of the north. This is mid-October in New Orleans. In a way, it's one of the best times of the year. A cool front had come through late yesterday, and so this morning I awoke to a crystal clear sky, a temperature in the 60s and an accompanying north wind. For the next month or so we'll ride the Fall roller-coaster of cool, crisp weather interspersed with warm muggy gulf air. It will be late November or early December before things finally settle down to what passes for winter down here. Today we had a club breakfast meeting scheduled after the Giro Ride, so since I wanted to be able to change into street clothes after riding, I drove the car out to the lakefront.

It was chilly out by the lake and the the unbuffered wind blowing in from across the 24-mile wide lake didn't help matters, either. I fished around in my bag and dug out my favorite piece of cycling clothing, my trusty UnDeflector. I was a little early, and as I rode slowly down the line of cars in the parking area I came upon Mignon who was wearing her new "Bolero" arm-warmers. I had assumed that they were supposed to be worn underneath a sleeveless jersey, but apparently not! Anyway, I thought it was typical Terry ingenuity to have come up with arm-warmers designed for sleeveless jerseys. Gotta hand it to them, they've somehow stood the test of time and always seem to have some different stuff.

We headed off down the lakefront kind of slowly with the wind buffeting everyone's front wheels, and we were quite a ways down Hayne Blvd. before the pace picked up. With the strong wind mostly in our faces, "fast" meant something in the 23 mph range in that direction. As you can imagine, the group spent a lot of time in a long circular paceline today, except of course for those times when we had a tailwind. Have you ever noticed how everyone is Superman when there's a tailwind? The pace gradually ramped up as we approached the Venetian Isles turnaround, but we were missing a few of the usual powerhouses today, so it never got too much out of hand.

Shortly after we got back to Hayne Blvd. on the way back, Roy went to the front and pulled a few of us all the way to the base of the Casino bridge at around 29 mph. After such a great leadout I started to sprint up the bridge, but backed off a bit because it just didn't seem right to blast past him after he'd taken such a monster pull. So I ended up waiting until the Seabrook bridge to do a little sprint up to the top.

A bunch of NOBC members got together for a very nice and productive breakfast meeting after the ride. Discussion centered mostly on 2009 club sponsorship and team-building issues, and a few of us left with homework assignments. With one of the sister-in-laws and her daughters at the house for the weekend, I was kind of glad to arrive home to an empty house and a voicemail saying that they had all gone to the French Quarter. I took the opportunity to do some fun stuff like get the oil in the car changed, trim the hedges, and investigate a little electrical problem with the porch light. I also got on the computer to research a problem we've been having with the front door speakers in the Volvo. As it turns out, this is a common problem, presumably caused by the company's environmental awareness. The nontoxic biodegradable glue that they use to hold the speaker magnets on apparently fails rather often, which explains the clunking sound I've been hearing from the suddenly nonfunctional left speaker area. I wonder how hard it is to get that door panel off.....