Detoured

I had to check the thermometer twice just to be sure. It was actually in the mid-50s at 6 am Thursday morning.  I might have been tempted to go out with bare legs, but experience has taught me a thing or two about early mornings on the levee.  One of those things is that the ice cold river water does a great job of refrigerating the air in its vicinity.  So I pulled on the knee-warmers and left the shoe covers in place just to be on the safe side. This was going to be an unusual Thursday ride anyway.  The Huey P. bridge construction project was scheduled to shut down both the bike path and river road from Thursday through Sunday, and the only viable detour would involve merging into all of the morning auto traffic on Jefferson Highway.  I figured it was worth a try anyway.  We had a handful of riders for the usual start, so when we got to the road closure we headed down through a heavily industrial area toward Jefferson, waited at a couple of incredibly long red lights (why are the ones in Jefferson Parish so damned long?) and hit Jeff Highway en masse, taking over the right lane without incident, and finally rejoining the bike path near the Harahan PHI heliport.  Once we were on the other side of the closure we came up on a number of other riders who had all started over there rather than brave the traffic. After that, the pace picked up and it was business as usual for the long Thursday ride.  Because of the extra distance and delays involved in getting around the road closures, a number of us ended up turning around at the "big dip" instead of going all the way out to Ormond.  On the way back I managed to lead the group down two dead-end streets hoping to find a better route around the blockage, but we eventually found out way back to the downriver side of the problem.

Thursday evening we took in my mom's orphaned dog and luckily there was no canine bloodshed as he and our other rather neurotic dog got acquainted. We optimistically left them together when we took off for work this morning.


Nature by Numbers from Cristóbal Vila on Vimeo.

So with the bike path still closed Friday morning, I figured I'd just play it by ear and go out for an easy spin.  The temperature was around 60F and the wind was calm, so naturally there was a pretty thick fog.  I figured I'd be by myself anyway, so I just left the blinky lights on, rode down to the road closure, and then headed back downriver for a couple of easy laps around Audubon Park before heading home.  The weekend weather is looking good so we may actually make it down to the Quarter for the Krewe du Vieux this year.  If, like me, you've always appreciated the beauty of the Fibonacci sequence and its relationship to biological architecture and nature, you'll love the Nature by Numbers video above!