Kind of a long day, today. I was up early for the ride out to the lakefront to meet the traditional Saturday Giro Ride. As has become typical lately, a lot of the riders just can't seem to make themselves wait for the 'official' 7 am start at West End, so they roll down the road early in little groups, confusing the other riders who don't know if they are THE group or not, so naturally the other riders turn around and join them, just in case. So once again a little group that actually started on time had to chase them all down for the first few miles.
The pace of the ride today seemed fairly fast, at least to me. The MSM guys were up at the front on the way out, attacking and counter-attacking, and by the time we were halfway down Chef Highway the number of riders willing to take a pull was getting dangerously low. So at one point I got to the front and took a relatively long pull at a relatively moderate speed to see if I could get the paceline started again. Well, as soon as I pulled off, Todd (I think) attacked, taking a number of riders with him. I was gapped off immediately and a couple of us worked together for a while to finally regain the lead group. Eventually they slowed down and pretty much everybody else caught back up too. After a few miles at recover speed after the turnaround, things heated up again, ending with the usual sprint for the Goodyear sign. I put in a little effort for that one, although I started from pretty far back, and a few miles later I did the same thing for the sprint to the top of the Casino bridge. By the time we got to the Seabrook bridge I was pretty well toasted and so after a half-hearted sprint halfway to the top I backed off early.
After the Giro I rushed home so I could meet The Daughter and her gymnasts at the Zoo for a "behind the scenes" tour arranged by the Sister in Law who works there. That was pretty interesting, even though I was feeling kind of tired and dehydrated the whole time. We got to go "backstage" at a couple of the exhibits, feeding fish, handling baby alligators, and getting some close-up visits with the foxes, various fish, nutria, etc. Later we visited the Anteater, Cougar and some of the primates whose species we had to promise to keep secret since I guess we weren't really supposed to be there. By the time we'd done all of that we were all getting pretty hot, tired and hungry, so we headed over to Louisiana Pizza Kitchen where I finished off two big classes of Coke and a pizza. The original plan had included an afternoon trip down the the French Quarter, but two of the girls needed to be at the airport for 5:30, so The Wife and I took them over there while The Daughter and the others went down to the Quarter. Well, what should have been a quick trip to the airport turned out 
to be a very long wait. Just as we were checking them in, they delayed the flight by a couple of hours, so we checked their bags and went over the the Mall to kill some time. Once there, we discovered that the flight had been delayed further, so we went to Barnes and Noble to kill some more time. Of course, once we had been at the bookstore for a while, we found that the flight had been delayed again. So the flight that was supposed to take off at 7:20 didn't finally leave until something like 10:50. Of course that means that somebody's parents will be driving to the Chicago airport to pick them up some time after 1 am. 
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