Sneaking One In

Starting back down the river from Ormond

Last night when Mignon sent an email out to the group asking if anyone was thinking about trying to sneak in a final pre-hurricane ride in the morning, I thought the chances were slim.  As it turned out, however, Tropical Storm Isaac (it remains to be seen whether it was even achieve hurricane status) hadn't really gotten its act together overnight and I awoke to dry streets.  It was, of course, pretty windy, but once the sun started to come up you could see that the sky didn't look all that threatening.  Up on the levee we had Tim, Woody, Mignon, and (!) Richard Hughes, in addition to myself as we rolled out at 6:15.  Most of the ride out to Ormond had a quartering crosswind, and the sections where it was more tailwind than crosswind got pretty fast.  The farther out we got, the more I started thinking about how hard the 20+ mile ride back was going to be.  Indeed, the ride back was hard.  A few times I almost lost it when Tim pulled off and the wind hit me full-force. I was already off of the levee and on my way down Oak Street when it started raining, so I guess our timing was pretty good. After riding I went out and filled up the neighbor's two 5-gallon gas cans, stopped in at Freret Hardware to say hello to Vivian and pick up some lamp oil just in case we end up without power for a long time.  I'm really not thinking this one is going to be too bad here in the city, although the lake is already starting to flood the area between the seawall and the levee.  I did spend some time down in the basement moving some things up off of the ground as a precaution, but here at the house I know that we won't get any water in our basement until it's at least six feet deep in Lakeview.