Falls and Weather

It was supposed to be a wash-out at the very least, a hurricane at the very most.  By mid-week the media were in a full-blown hurricane frenzy.  The radar didn't really look that impressive, but the storm tracks were consistently predicting landfall close enough to New Orleans to be a problem.  By the end of the week races were cancelled and the annual MS Tour was up in the air. I hadn't yet missed a day of riding, although one of those had been fairly damp, but the weekend was not looking promising. 

I woke up Saturday morning to the sound of car tires on wet asphalt. Looking out the window at the dark streets I could at least see that is wasn't actually raining, so I checked the radar.  Surprisingly, it looked fine, so I kitted up and headed over to Starbucks to see who else would show up for the Giro Ride.  Although the turnout was pretty low, it was still good enough and we rolled out just a bit late.

As we cruised down Lakeshore Drive someone suddenly said, "Look!"  Off to our right a bald eagle was flying right alongside us, but by the time I could get my camera out of my pocket he had perched on one of the struggling live oaks that the levee board keeps trying to grow along a brackish lake.  I got a rather poor shot, but at least I got a shot of the first eagle of the fall season.  They seem to disappear during the summer, so I always look forward to seeing them again in the fall.  Somewhere along Lakeshore Drive a rider on a triathlon bike latched onto the back of the group. 

We rode over the Seabrook bridge, climbed the Casino bridge, and were descending onto Hayne Blvd when I heard people calling out behind me.  Looking back I could see a rider on the ground who wasn't moving and I immediately knew what had happened.  It was the guy on the tri bike.  He had dropped his front wheel into the slot between one of the drain grates and the concrete and gone down basically on his head and shoulder.  By the time I got back there he was sitting up.  He was slightly disoriented and it looked like he might need some stitches around his eye socket but it didn't look like anything was broken.  We called for an ambulance and waited until it arrived.  In the meantime he got in touch with someone.  Surprisingly, the ambulance loaded both him and his bike into the ambulance and they headed off to the ER.  It didn't take too long after we got started for the pace to ramp up and despite the small group we had a reasonably fast Giro Ride.  The weather the rest of the day was not particularly bad, and it was looking like the storm was stalled down in the gulf and disintegrating.

So Sunday morning the weather was quite nice. I had been expecting a lot of wind, but in fact it was nearly calm as I rode out to the Sunday Giro.  Turnout was even smaller than it had been on Saturday. I had been expecting an easy ride.  A number of the riders were planning on riding out to Slidell, but even so the pace got pretty fast on the way out.  Once the rest of us turned around the ride back was fairly easy.

The old Pennine is almost ready for cyclocross season now.  I took off the fenders, put on the cyclocross wheels, swapped out the Look pedals for the spd pedals, and just need to replace the headset which is so pitted that it barely turns.