Blue Skies and Tire Boots

The collegiate ride had riders from ULL, Nicholls, LSU, and Tulane.

It was another weekend of great weather down here, unless of course you are plant life in which case things are getting kind of desperate water-wise.  For the Saturday Giro Ride I pulled on the arm-warmers for the first time this season. Although the pre-dawn temperature was just a few degrees below 60F, it was pretty windy and  felt substantially colder. Although it eventually warmed up to the upper 60s, I was never inclined to stuff them into my pocket. Out on Chef Highway I was toward the back of a long skinny line of riders when I heard a loud explosion followed by the sound of something metallic bouncing around on the asphalt.  One of the guys had slashed a pretty good hole in his tire.  A few of us stopped to help, which was a good thing because we needed the piece of an old Mr. Tuffy I had in my bag in order to get him rolling again. Even so, we didn't dare put more than about 40 psi in the tire, fortunately on the front wheel, for fear of blowing the entire tire boot right through the gaping, bulging hole.  He headed back home (don't know if he made it) and we continued on, eventually turning around to get back into the group that was already on its way back. Other than a mile or two where four of us were bridging across a big gap that happened at an intersection, it was a moderately paced Giro.

Lots of narrow shady roads

Sunday morning there was the Collegiate Family Ride up in St. Francisville.  Quentin had reserved one of Tulane's new passenger vans, and I was to pick it up at 6:45 am from the parking lot on campus.  Problem was, nobody was there.  I went back and checked the emails about it and realized that the person handling that must have thought the trip was on Saturday rather than Sunday. So I had to run back home and take my own car to meet the rest of the group.  Luckily there was another car available and only five of us going after one had backed out at the last minute, so it was no problem, but it would have been nice to have been able to work out the still unresolved issue of how many bikes we can get into the thing, which will depend on whether we can remove the rear seats. On the way over, along the elevated portion of I-10 where it crosses the marsh between New Orleans and LaPlace we spotted four bald eagles, presumably two mating pairs.  Nice to see them returning to the area for the winter.

The weather was pretty much as good as it gets.

There was a decent sized group for the ride this year, and by the time we arrived the temperature was just warm enough to leave the arm-warmers in the car.  This was a nice controlled-pace 60 miles or so on pretty quiet roads, which was nice. My injured hand/wrist is still hurting.  It seems to be more of a wrist problem now than hand problem, and the 12-hour naproxin that I took kept it from being very bothersome. We hadn't gone fifteen miles when one of the riders hit something and slashed his tire pretty badly.  Luckily I had put more tire boot material into my bag the night before.  This hole was so big I needed two pieces of Mr. Tuffy to keep the tube from blowing out, so Dustin gave him directions to the nearest gas station with instructions to sit tight and wait from rescue.  I guess he made it there. Later, of course, Dustin had us riding through a small section of gravel which of course resulted in another flat. Then, as we approached a fence line, a white horse snuck through a hole in it and started running alongside the group. When he turned toward the middle of the road everyone pretty much came to a stop, not knowing what he would do next.  Then we gingerly rode by as he watched us.  As if that wasn't enough, the whole group almost got taken out by a truck and trailer that came speeding around a bend on a narrow country road.  Lucky nobody was over on the left side.

Hope this horse made it back home safely

I felt pretty good on this ride.  The weather was perfect and the pace was moderate, so I was never stressed.  It was a nice morning to look at the scenery.  I spent most of the ride at the back keeping track of the newer riders who I knew would eventually hit their limits.  I think a few of them had never ridden more than forty miles at one time. The front of the group kept the pace down in the 16-21 mph range most of the time, at least until we were approaching "Red Bug Hill" a couple of miles before the finish. Naturally it became a race from there to the end so the group pretty much blew apart.  I turned back and picked up a few of the stragglers to pace them in the last couple of miles. Afterward we all drove into Baton Rouge for a late lunch at Kaminari Sushi and Hibachi, near the LSU campus. For a buffet style sushi place it was reasonably decent and inexpensive, which more than met my standards for that sort of thing.

So I was surprised to find Steve Tilford actually posting stuff to his blog.  Well, actually I'm not all that surprised since it's Steve Tilford, but if it was pretty much anybody else I'd be surprised. He's still having constant headaches and other neurological difficulties as a result of cracking his head on the road about 11 days ago. He hasn't been sleeping much and really doesn't have the energy to read emails or that sort of thing, which is expected after a severe head injury. He probably shouldn't be trying to type on the computer either, although he has been keeping it very short. On the plus side, his writing is pretty much normal, so that's a good sign.

Of course nobody noticed this inconspicuous label.

Meanwhile, I'd been waiting for a couple of weeks for an 80mm stem that I'd ordered.  When I had to get new handlebars I figured I'd see how a 1 cm shorter stem might feel and whether it would make any difference to my aging neck and back.  they called right away and told me it wasn't in stock but they could get one in a few days, and since I wasn't desperate for it, I was fine with that.  Anyway, when it still hadn't shown up by Saturday I called and they said they showed it had been delivered on the 11th and that the tracking said it had been left with an "agent." So this morning I made the rounds to the neighboring offices looking for it.  Turns out it had been shipped via USPS and they had delivered it to the university mail room.  The mail room had stuck a huge label on it with my office and name on it and brought it over to our satellite location along with the other mail.  Somehow it ended up in the personnel office a couple of doors over where we have a "slot." However, it didn't find its way into that particular slot, so nobody picked it up and it just sat there.  Shipping that little box involved the shipper, the US Postal Service, the University Mail Room, and the Personnel Department (aka the Workforce Management Office).  What could go wrong?