Batture Mansion

I opened the door and just stood there for a moment as my groggy brain tried to access the section of the archive indexed under "riding in the fog."  The thick fog had caught me by surprise, and it took me a little while to make the decision to ride.  In fact, the fog wasn't quite thick enough to turn me back.  Besides, I was getting desperate for a ride and my options were limited.  So I headed out to the levee wondering if it would be even worse along the river.  Luckily, it wasn't much thicker out there, and surprisingly there were even a few other guys out there waiting.  I knew I didn't have enough time to do the whole ride, but at least I would be able to get in a solid seventy-five minutes or so. There was a little delay on the way out when Woody stopped to help someone in need of a tire iron, so I had to turn around about a mile before Williams Blvd. in order to get back home in time to shower, change, and ride out to the hospital for my morning visit.  Around 11:00 I headed back down the river to the office, stopping along the way to take a photo of what is definitely the fanciest batture house I've ever seen.  They've been working on this particular house for quite a long time, actually, but this was the first time I'd seen it in daylight in a couple of months.  The thing is practically a Batture Mansion.  Even better, it was already sporting its Mardi Gras decorations.

This morning found me back on the levee by 6:15 am trying once again to squeeze in an hour or so of riding, basically repeating my Tuesday ride, this time without the company of the early Tuesday group.  By the time I'd ridden  home, changed, ridden back out to Ochsner, and then back down to the office, it was 11:30.  Work today seemed like a series of frustrations until 3:30 when I got word that my mother was ready to be transferred from the CICU to a "skilled nursing" facility out at Elmwood.  I have to admit, I wondered who came up with the term "skilled nursing."  I mean, does that mean that the other nursing is unskilled?  One thing I've noticed over the past 24 days that my mother has been in the hospital is that the average size and mass of the nursing staff in the ICU is a whole lot lower than those of the staff in the skilled nursing facility.  I'm not sure why the difference, but I'm quite confident it would hold up to statistical scrutiny.  Anyway, this is a bit of progress.

So I got Issue 02 of Peloton magazine today.  I immediately recognized most of Jered's photos, both because they tend to include Ashley, and because of his tendency to fiddle with the color saturation.  I have to admit, I've started to do the latter myself from time to time.  This issue has a long article on Eddy Merckx that really made me feel kind of old.  There were photos of old bikes that looked way too familiar to me, along with a special page with a big title that read, "1972 - The Greatest Season Ever."  That year he had 127 race days.  It was the year that Atari released Pong.  The year Apollo 16 landed on the moon. The year Merckx won his 4th consecutive Tour de France.  It was also the year of the first Tour de Louisiane. I was there, too green and timid to actually enter, but I still drove out to Donaldsonville to watch John Howard crash, grab a bike from a spectator, and claw his way back to the pack, and then to the breakaway, back in the days before free laps when criteriums were measured in miles (in this case 50 of them) rather than minutes. This will the our little Tour's 40th year. Who would ever have believed that the oldest continuous stage race in the United States would be in New Orleans?