Obstacles

The streets were dark and just a bit foggy this morning as I worked my way through the battered streets of Carrollton. In addition to the normal assortment of potholes and water leaks, the neighborhood has lately been dealing with a flurry of road work. Indeed, the rest of the city is not immune from this development. A convergence of the "submerged streets program," the federal Stimulus Package, and the upcoming elections has resulted in a real heyday for the road and levee construction industries. Here in the uptown area St. Charles Avenue has been all torn up for weeks, and just yesterday they started tearing up Carrollton as well. Of course this particular rain cloud has its silver lining, in this case the promise of fresh asphalt and some long-awaited bike lane markers. Meanwhile, out on Lakeshore Drive they're about to start tearing up the road near Elysian Fields Avenue and the Seabrook loop, which will eventually necessitate a little detour for the weekend Giro Rides. The price of progress, I suppose. I just wish they'd sprinkle a little bit of that progress on Pine Street to make my daily commute a little less painful.

So the long levee ride had a good turnout today -- maybe fifteen riders at the start. I sat on the front for a long time as we rolled out from the start, but once I dropped back down the long line of riders the pace started to lift. When I saw Woody and Tim move up the side of the group to the front I figured it would get even faster. The only problem was that once we reached the Country Club we found ourselves in a pretty good fog, not that anyone ever seems to slow down for that. Anyway, I was pretty much stuck near the back of the paceline and unwilling to risk life and limb to move up until visibility improved. That was OK, though, because I was getting quite enough work anyway. After Tim and Woody pulled off to go home around The Dip, the pace slowed down a bit and the paceline finally started rotating all the way through. By then the sun was coming up and the air was beginning to warm up. In fact, I think the temperature today ultimately got up to around 70F.

On the way home I thought it was a perfect day for a stop at Zotz for a cup of coffee, so John and I sat out on Oak Street for a while enjoying the nice weather and chatting with this older guy who started a conversation by asking John, who was wearing shoe-covers, where he got those shoes. This 75-year-old turned out to have a son who had run track at Cal Tech or something. He asked us why he never sees any bike races in town. Good question.

Once I was fully caffeinated I headed home, getting stuck on Carrollton Avenue for a while because the construction crew had all of the side streets blocked off. Looks like I'm going to have to make some little changes to my usual route for the next couple of months. Anyway, I hadn't been at the office for half an hour when I got a call telling me that the afternoon meeting in Baton Rouge that we'd been working on for half of last week had been abruptly cancelled by the state senator with whom we were supposed to be meeting. Damn. Back to square one. Again.....