Back in Time

Instead of riding Saturday morning, I instead lugged a bunch of heavy marine batteries around so we could get The Boat started. The guy who was buying the boat showed up with six of those suckers and after I helped haul them down to the dock and up onto the boat, he proceeded to disconnect and remove six of the old ones. As he handed me the last one he remarked, "You know, I have no idea how to reconnect these, do you?" Good grief. When you've got something like nine batteries, with two banks wired in series and another for the generator, it would be wise to remove and replace them one at a time, dontcha think? Someone else showed up a bit later and after a few tries finally managed to get everything hooked up again so that the engines would start. We went out for a brief test ride and they made plans to finalize the whole deal late next week. Since there was no way to get the a/c in the house repaired until next week either, we headed back to NOLA in the early afternoon, which meant I would be back in time to make the training ride planned for Sunday morning out on the Tour de La road race course.

Sam and I headed out at 6:15 in order to make the 8:00 ride start way up north of Folsom. There was a strong southeast wind blowing and the sky was overcast, but I was thankful for the chance to get in a good training ride since I hadn't had a chance to ride at all on Saturday. That 16 mile loop is a deceptively hard one, and I had no idea how many laps the group was planning on doing. There was a nice group of about fifteen for this ride, and the first lap started out at a moderate pace. Then, when we came to the last turn on the loop the group got split when half of us stopped in order to keep from being run over by an approaching car. Once we got rolling again we could see a couple of stragglers, so we waited for them. By then the front group, which apparently didn't wait for us, was disappearing into the distance. Fortunately, I knew a little shortcut, and when we emerged from it back onto the course, the front group was right there. Perfect timing! The pace was faster for this lap, and didn't ease up much for the next one either. By the end of the third lap the group was down to seven or so and we stopped on the side of the road where Jason had stashed an ice chest full of cold drinks. We rode one more lap at a somewhat slower speed before heading back to the cars. I felt pretty good except that my back, right arm, and right hip were all sore from Saturday's unplanned battery weightlifting session.

Luckily, we missed the big thunderstorms that rolled through the northshore area about an hour after we left. We didn't get a whole lot of rain down in New Orleans, though. The forecast for tomorrow has some rain in it, but at least the probability of rain in the morning is relatively low.