Wind and Rain

A bunch of club members headed over to the Tour de Louisiane road course on Saturday to ride a few laps, sweep some corners, and have lunch in Covington.  As usual, I rode the first lap with a can of bright green road marking paint in my bottle cage stopping at each intersection to freshen up the arrows.  We regrouped at the end of that lap and then did one lap at a faster pace, regrouping again at the church.  For some reason the group got all split up after that.  I started out with a few of the guys, rolling easy and waiting or the rest to catch up, but as I looked back I could see nothing but empty asphalt, so after a couple of miles I dropped off and turned around, wondering where everyone was.  Finally a couple more riders appeared, but the road behind them was still empty, so we went ahead, not know if the others might have decided to turn back.  The front group was probably four or five minutes up the road, so we took a shortcut and as we emerged back onto the course met right up with them.  Perfect timing or random luck.  By then it was getting pretty hot and to me it felt like the first truly hot summer weekend day of the year.

So I went innocently out to meet the Giro Ride this morning, having neglected to check the radar since the forecast had been unremarkable and the sky looked find.  Arriving at Starbucks, though, Jeff said he thought we'd get wet.  Apparently the radar looked worse than ominous.  Well, when we hit Lakeshore Drive, we could see nothing but black clouds over the lake and people were already talking about where we might turn around.  From there it got worse really quickly.  I was thinking maybe we'd make it to the end of Hayne Blvd., but as we came over the Casino bridge we felt this shockingly cold downdraft and suddenly we were being buffeted by 30 mph crosswinds.  There were no dissenters when we turned around half a mile later to head back over the bridge.  By then the gusty winds were getting pretty scary, especially as we went over the bridges, but at least it was about 80% tailwind by then.  I took the shortest route back from Lakeshore Drive, stopping for a moment to chat at the off-road duathlon in progress at City Park, and arrived back home just as the big raindrops were starting to fall.