Weekday Routine

Part-way to work on Lowerline Street approaching Willow on a nice Spring morning

It's been a pretty routine week around here. After what I felt was a solid week of training, I was feeling a little achy and decided to make Monday a "rest day." The night before I'd re-cabled the Bianchi, spending quite a bit of time spraying lube into the right shifter in hopes of getting it to work a little better. The sad fact is that no amount of lube is going to make up for the fact that it's just plain worn out. Anyway, I got to bed kind of late, so it wasn't hard to decide to stay in bed an extra half hour. Tuesday and Wednesday were the regular early morning group rides. Neither was particularly hard, but neither was too easy either, especially since I was trying to do a little more work than usual. This morning I was feeling a little dragged out from the start and quickly decided to spend the ride hiding from the wind at the back. The weather around here has actually been pretty nice. The early morning temperatures have been a little cooler than I like but half an hour in I'm warmed up and it's fine. I think I was the only one wearing arm-warmers this morning.

Closer to St. Charles and the River you see lots of houses that
were built around 1890-1915 or so - wooden shutters, some
with Victorian accents, built on brick piers three or four
steps up from the ground.

Since it's been so dark in the morning and the rides have been so routine, I haven't been taking any photos lately, so I decided I'd instead take some on my commute to work. My regular route is a very relaxing two miles or so that I traverse at an average speed of maybe 10 mph. I ride down Lowerline Street, which is so named because it was the lower, or downriver, border of the town of Carrollton that was eventually annexed to New Orleans as it expanded. Carrollton is laid out in a fairly consistent grid, although the streets on the upriver and downriver sides aren't quite parallel. As a result, a number of streets that start out at the river end at some point before reaching South Claiborne. The original layout had large squares with the streets in one direction being named after trees (Maple, Oak, Willow, Elm, Sycamore, Birch, Hickory, Spruce, etc.) and those in the other direction named for people. Later the large squares were split up into four smaller squares, so the new streets generally got named after people from the town. After Carrollton was annexed to New Orleans, some of the streets got re-named to inherit the names of the city streets that they connected with.

A small shotgun near Black Pearl with a large, recently added
Camelback addition.

Since it's springtime down here everything is bright green and there are all sorts of flowers all over the place. Today there were a lot of bright yellow Cat's Claw flowers in the road here and there. Although their flowers are pretty, the vine itself is pure evil. It's practically impossible to get rid of, so the best you can hope for is to establish a stalemate.

Office Parking