Nice November Weather

A clear blue sky, slightly cooler temperature, and a bit less wind made it a fine morning for riding. The night before, someone had posted that the unpaved gravel hump in the bike path that we've been avoiding for the past couple of months had finally been re-paved, so it would be the first time the group would be doing the "full" long ride in a while.

The ride out to the turnaround started off at a pretty good clip, especially considering the crosswind. I think everything was still together, though, when we spotted Donald about a minute up the road. That's kind of when things started to get out of hand. It seemed that Rob was determined to catch him before the turnaround, and the pace started to pick up in fits and spurts until the front of the group fractured completely. Rob and one other rider split off the front and caught, but the minute they did, Donald ramped the pace up another notch and it split again, ultimately leaving Rob and a string of lone riders, including me, spread out over half a mile of bike path as we approached the upriver end of the bike path at Ormond.

The group was unusually slow to come back together on the way back, and at one point before we had all regrouped, Rob was pulling just three or four of us at the front with the rest of the group fifteen seconds back. So someone told Rob to ease up and wait, but since, as usual, he had his ipod plugged firmly into his head he didn't hear him. So we let him go and eased up to regroup, but it was fairly obvious that the rest of the group wasn't really too interested in catching. Rob eventually looked back, discovered he was alone, and eased up. I suspect, though, that Donald was being passive-aggressive and for some reason didn't want to ride with Rob today. A few of us rode up to Rob, thinking that the rest of the group was right behind us, but as it turned out, there was still a fair bit of space between us. Anyway, we eventually ended up with just a little group of four off the front. Rob was pushing the pace a bit, and when I realized that two out of our four would soon be either pulling off or turning around, I decided to sit on the back and conserve some energy for the inevitable two-man time trial into the wind with Rob riding on his forearms and me hunting around for a bit of draft. So it turned out to be a pretty hard ride by my standards, and I was all too happy to sit up at the Playground for a long cool-down and let Rob sail off down the river.

The weather was so nice all day that around 1 pm I decided to go for a ride around the park rather than eat lunch. When I got near the entrance I spotted a couple of people sitting on a bench eating po-boys. Behind them was a fully loaded tandem touring bike. So naturally I stopped to get the story. It was a couple from Scotland who had ridden down the entire length of the Mississippi River. They had just arrived in New Orleans via the bike path and had stopped at GNO Cyclery to get a broken spoke fixed. They had directions to someone's house for the night. I figure they were in their late 60s and they looked just a bit road-weary. Even at the modest speed they were doing, however, they were happy to be near the end of their journey, which in this case was the little town of Venice, another fifty or sixty miles downriver, I think. It's basically where the pavement, and dry ground, ends.