The Days before Mardi Gras

Mardi Gras Commeth...

The American men of American Men Roofing arrived promptly at 7 am on Friday to tear off the 40+ year-old built-up asphalt roof over the back room. Considering the fact that doing so was the roofing equivalent to opening Pandora's Box, I skipped my Friday ride so I could be around to see of any of them fell through into the kitchen. Amazingly, the old 2x4s serving as rafters held together despite the to very large Americans ripping through the multiple strata of tar and gravel up there. They went about their work with the disinterested efficiency of characteristic of guys who have been there and done that many times before. By 2 pm nobody had fallen through the ceiling, they'd flamed down the new roof, cleaned up the yard, collected the money, and rushed off to someone's daughter's school soccer game.  I briefly considered going out for a ride, but I'd been cold all morning sitting at my computer "working from home" and in spite of the sunny sky, the temperature was still in the low 50s.  Somehow I just couldn't get my ass out the door. As I'd discover the next morning, I should have.

Things are ramping up around here in anticipation of Mardi Gras.  There are parades every night, and most of the day this weekend. Rented mobile homes are parked out front of the frat houses on Broadway and the crowd at The Boot is overflowing into the street. People have been camped out on the neutral ground along tonight's Endymion parade route since yesterday. We'll be heading downtown to Tulane's Tidewater building in a couple of hours where we'll be trapped until the parade, which starts at 4:15.  The last float probably won't pass us down on Canal Street until late tonight.

So this morning the thermometer was reading 41F, although I think it was more like 39 in some spots, when I headed out to meet the Giro at Starbucks. It was full tights and winter jacket weather by my standards. It was also a New Chain ride, since I'd replaced the chain and chainrings Thursday evening before rushing off to catch the Muses parade down on St. Charles Avenue. When I stood up to cross S. Claiborne Ave. I got the not unexpected bad news. At least three of my most-used cassette cogs were toast and the nice new shiny Campagnolo Record chain was skipping over the teeth pretty badly. My bad.  I had set up a warning on Strava or Garmin Connect to tell me when the old chain reached 3,000 miles but had put off getting a new one for another 1,500 or so. Basically, I had a choice of the 17 or 12 cogs.  For some reason, which I would discover later, the bike wouldn't shift to the 11.

So the ride started out fairly calmly.  There were a few people missing, of course, thanks to the prior night's parades or today's plans or just the cold weather.  In fact, I was halfway through my Americano by the time anybody else showed up at Starbucks.  With my limited gear selection as a plausible excuse, I was quite content today to hang around the back of the paceline, occasionally letting bigger guys move ahead of me when they pleaded for the better draft. We had an increasing wind at our faces most of the way out to the turnaround, which kept the speeds on the low side and made it easy to sit in. This morning's visiting rider was Eric who was on a TT bike but seemed quite capable and fit in nicely, mostly near the front. Yeah, I should have taken some photos, but it was cold and it's a pain with my gloves on.

Once we started back I was expecting a super-fast drag race down Chef Highway, but for some reason that didn't really happen until we were a couple of miles from the Goodyear sprint sign.  I just plopped it into the 12 and slow-pedaled in the ample draft of the group, which started to disintegrate once we'd been going 30+ mph for a couple of minutes.

It was a nice, albeit uneventful, Giro Ride and  riding along Lakeshore Drive I was already thinking about that legit French almond King Cake from Maple Street Patisserie waiting for me at home when my dreams were suddenly interrupted by a god-awful sound coming from Jim's bike, just to my right. The rest of the group continued on as Jim ground to a stop, so I turned back to see what the problem was, thinking he'd pinch-flatted on the potholes near Franklin Avenue and bottomed-out his carbon wheel.  As it turned out, that wasn't the problem at all.  Instead, he'd put a rusty old 10-penny nail right through his tire and Mr. Tuffy. I extracted it with my gloved hand, with some effort, and luckily the hole wasn't so big as to require a boot.

On the way home the police were already diverting traffic, including me, on Marconi where the Endymion floats line up, even though none were there yet. so I had to detour over to Canal. It wasn't a problem, but really, why not let the bicycles ride through? Along Canal the neutral ground was already lined with people who had been camping out there to claim their spots since at least yesterday, many with neatly delineated "property lines" marked with survey tape on the ground. Tomorrow I'll do another Giro Ride and maybe make it over to Magazine Street for Thoth.  We'll see.  It's looking like it will be a dry but cold Mardi Gras this year. Better than the cold and wet one we had last time.