Conference and Collegiate

It was still early in the week when I realized it was going to get complicated.  I was on call for Jury Duty all week, I was signed up for a conference downtown all day Thursday and most of Friday, and I had to get to Baton Rouge by Friday evening to start officiating for their weekend collegiate race.  The Daughter was scheduled to be in town Thursday through Monday.  One bit of luck came on Wednesday when I found out that I was released from Jury Duty for the remainder of the week.  The biggest complication then became transportation since I wasn't going to be able to take the car. 

The NCURA Pre-Award Conference started early on Thursday, so Wednesday was the last day I'd be able to throw a leg over a bike. I was scheduled to lead an ad hoc walking tour of the French Quarter Thrusday evening.  The conference itself was OK, starting with an excellent keynote address by Tulane's Maureen Lichtveld.  The rest of the day was a mix of sessions, some good, some not so good.  After the last session, around 5 pm, I saw that four or five people had signed up for the walking tour, so when everyone got together a little later we decided to do a quick one-hour walk through the French Quarter to Frenchman Street and back.  The idea was to be back in time for any of the 6:30 dinner groups.  Well, when I checked my watch as we were walking down Frenchman I realized it was already after 6:30, so that plan was out the window.  We ended up hunting around for a restaurant that didn't have too long of a wait, finally settling on the Palace Cafe' on Canal Street.  That actually turned out surprisingly well, although it wasn't until after 10:00 that I got back home.  Then on Friday I went straight from the conference to the Budget car rental place down on Canal St. around 4:30 to rent a car for the weekend, then rushed home, packed some clothes, loaded up the car with the PA system, traffic cones, signs, etc., and headed for LSU.  That trip, which normally would take maybe 75 minutes, took more like two hours by the time I crawled through ten miles of Baton Rouge gridlock.  On the plus side, I arrived at the Union early enough to relax a bit and get all of the pre-reg riders into the computer before heading back to the La Quinta hotel around 10:30.

Saturday morning I was up around 5 am to drive up to St. Francisville for the Road Race and Time Trial. Ricky, the other official, arrived from Monroe right on time, so while he got the finish line area set up, I handled race-day registration. It was chilly, but the races went quite smoothly and we got everything off pretty much on time.  Ricky was using the new RapidCam finish line camera, which came in quite handy for some of the close sprint finishes.  I was using my iPAD as backup, along with the other regular camera that we run at the finish.  After the road races, we had just enough time to run back into St. Francisville and grab a sandwich at Subway before heading back in time to get the evening time trials going.  Those went smoothly, and we got the results posted to the LAMBRA website around 8:00.  Sunday morning was another early wake-up for the criterium that was to be held around the state capitol building. The course was pretty nice from all reports, and even though we had to judge about a million 4-deep points primes in addition to the finishes of seven races, it all went pretty well and we had the final results posted about ten minutes after the last race ended.  I got back to New Orleans with plenty of time to walk over to Plum Street SnoBalls for some of the first snoballs of the season.  I was pretty tired by the time I got the final results posted to the website later that evening.  Tomorrow will be the first day I've been able to ride since Thursday, making it by far the worst riding week I've had since I broke my collarbone back at the end of September.