Follow the Impulse

Promptly at 6 am a text message arrived. "7 am or 1 pm for northshore?" Good question. It was dark and a light rain was falling, and the tm was coming from the only person remotely likely to meet me for the drive across the lake. I stumbled down the hall to have a look at the radar. It looked substantially better north of the lake than south, but neither looked particularly good. On the other hand, the cool front was supposed to pass through by noon or so and after that everything looked great. As much as I wanted to do a long ride in the hills, the possibility of having to deal with a long wet slog with a handful of riders didn't feel so appealing this morning. A little while later another TM came that said, "Staying on southshore. Good luck with the weather." So I went back to bed figuring on getting out later in the day when things were looking better. By 11:00 a few other riders were talking about meeting at noon, so I threw my hat into the ring as well. By then the rain was over and the streets were mostly dry.

Up on the levee at noon I rode slowly upriver and met up with Lawrence, Mignon, Brooks. A little while later we came upon Charlie and Tim, who was towing a bike trailer containing his kid. There was a pretty good crosswind and a paceline formed right away. Tim hung on for a while, but it's pretty hard to get a draft in a crosswind when you're pulling a trailer. I dropped back to get a picture just about when he was about to come off, and by the time I shot a couple of photos I had a pretty good gap to close. I got a few photos, but none came out very well because of the bright background, otherwise known as the sky.

The ride out toward Destrehan was nice and smooth, although the combination of crosswind and Brooks' long pulls eventually split Mignon and Lawrence off. Then, as we approached the Luling bridge I impulsively said, "Let's ride over the bridge today." Well, one thing led to the other and soon the plan was to cross the river at Luling and then ride back downriver on the west bank to the Canal St. ferry. This, of course, would mean an extra 20+ miles. There was some quick discussion about who had what to eat, but ultimately everybody was "in" for this impulsive excursion.

The ride over the Luling suspension bridge is really a nice one except for all of the debris on the shoulder. Since it's technically part of the interstate, riding on the shoulder is the only feasible option, though. I pulled out the camera as we started the climb, but stashed it back in my pocket for the fast downhill. Damn, I like going downhill! Once we were on the west bank we had four or five miles on River Road with passing cars and no shoulder that was a little tense, but after that we were able to get up on the levee bike path for much of the trip back downriver to Algiers Point where we met the Canal St. ferry. The bike path is interrupted by the big Avondale shipbulding facility and then later by the old lock. After the nice ferry ride back across the river, we got tangled up a bit in parade traffic. The Carrollton parade had just ended, and the end of the next parade was still on St. Charles, but we managed to get across the parade route and rode down St. Charles all the way back uptown, finally getting back onto the levee bike path at the parish line.

So I had gone out at noon thinking that maybe I'd get in 44 miles, but ended up with around 70. I was glad I'd slipped a Powerbar into my pocket before I left. It was a really fun ride and a great break from the regular training ride routine, even though it took a bit longer. We should definitely do this loop more often.