3-Day Week ... End

The weather always seems to balance out, and despite Saturday's spray-fest on the northshore, Sunday morning started out pretty good and then just got better and better. Just before heading out the door I rang up Jon to see if he was going to stop by for the ride out to the lakefront, but he said he'd awakened with a sore throat and figured he'd best play it safe with an easy spin on the levee later in the day. Outside, the air was finally warm enough for me to head out in just shorts and jersey, so Spring has officially arrived. Yeah, I know we'll still have some chilly mornings over the next few weeks, but I have the feeling we're over the hump now. The city is full of bright green new leaves, azaleas and camellias, and of course oak pollen.

So I hit Robert E. Lee right at 7 am and rode over to Marconi where there was a little group assembled near Matt's house waiting for the first part of the Giro to come past. I was quite surprised how many people we accumulated along the way, considering it was Easter Sunday. The ride itself picked up momentum along Hayne Blvd. and got going pretty hard in places, but on a scale of one to ten, where ten is "strong guys getting dropped like rocks" and one is "sitting up discussing politics," I'd give it maybe a seven. That was just on the way out, though. After we turned around it seemed like everyone called a truce and the pace was mostly conversational. I suspect there were a few tired legs in the group at the end of this three-day weekend. Diego had ridden something like 120 miles the day before with Jason so even at the tender young age of 18 he must have been feeling just a little bit tired, right? I guess "a little bit tired" at 18 is pretty much equivalent to how I feel getting out of bed on a good day. For myself, I could certainly feel the effects of four good training days in a row, but on the other hand I was pleased to find that my legs were still pretty functional. Anyway, it was mostly a nice steady ride back with just a couple of brief efforts going over the bridges. As soon as I got home, The Wife told me that the AAA truck had just arrived to fix a flat for the neighbor whose father had slashed a tire on a corner on the way there and had then tripped in the driveway, cut himself up pretty badly, and was already on his way to the emergency room. It seems to have been a bad week for car tires around here.

Sunday evening we went over to my mother's place next to Audubon park. Things over there were completely out of control down at street level. There were hundreds of people stuck in gridlock in their wagon-wheeled cars and loud motorcycles blasting crappy rap music, drinking daiquiris, driving against traffic, pissing in the bushes, trying to take shortcuts onto the Fly by driving on the bike path (there was a police car guarding it, though), and generally being about as loud and obnoxious as possible. It's a good thing I don't have a sniper rifle. Instead, I called the 2nd district police station a couple of times. They usually have to send a detail down there every weekend evening in the spring because of this crap. Yesterday they probably should have doubled it. Anyway, it finally settled down about an hour after sunset since they close off the Fly when it gets dark. By then there was trash all over the ground because these people generally don't give a rat's ass about who they irritate or how they leave their own city.