Hurricane Hype

The Giro coming back across the still-open Hwy 90 floodgate.

It was an emergency, an imminent disaster, the end of life as we know it. At least, that's what it sounded like on Friday. The mayor put on his disaster costume (as if he was out there filling sandbags himself) and got onto television with his entire entourage behind him - Disaster Response, Sewerage and Water Board, Police Chief, etc., etc. He imposed a city-wide curfew to which I knew nobody would pay the least bit of attention. I had been following the storm for days via spaghettimodels.com and was pretty sure this wasn't going to be much of a disaster. Of course, there's always the possibility of a tornado, or just having some old termite-damaged part of the house collapse, but at the worst I was expecting maybe one day without electricity and a few tree branches on the ground.

The price of riding Chef Highway through Gentilly.

Hurricane Nate was supposed to make landfall late Saturday night. I immediately began making plans - for how we would get in our weekend training rides. On Friday they started closing floodgates, of which there were many. The Giro Ride crosses two floodgates on the way out and three on the way back, so it was by no means certain that we'd be able to do the usual route. Putting some faith in the city's sluggishness to do anything, however, a big group rolled out from Starbucks at 7 am anyway. We figured that the floodgates at the lakefront would be closed already (they were), so we headed out down Robert E. Lee to Leon C. Simon, and from there it was the usual Giro out to Chef Highway. The Highway 90 floodgate was open, so we rode hard out to the turnaround at Venetian Isles (which was under an evacuation order with the streets already under water because the lake was so high from two days of strong southeast winds). On the way back we again made it through the open Highway 90 floodgate, but by the time we got to the Casino bridge near Lakefront Airport there was a police car blocking the overpass. The floodgate at Dowman Road was already closed, so we had to detour to the Highway 90 bridge, which meant riding back in to town on Chef Highway, which is not a whole lot of fun because of stop lights and traffic and sketchy roads. Matt flatted. Twice. Even so, I was only a few miles short compared to a normal Giro, so that was good.

By the time I got home it was already looking like the hurricane, which was moving at the unheard-of speed of 25 mph, was going to come ashore somewhere in Mississippi. Of course, nobody was making any promises, so much of the day was spent watching local newscasters and Weather Channel people kill time with painfully repetitive talk. They were doing their best to make something big out of the story, but the reality was that this was going to be a fairly minor hurricane, as hurricanes go, and since it was moving so quickly, the effects would be minimized even more. By early evening it was obvious we were going to miss out on all of the excitement. I went downstairs and cleaned the bike and started thinking about Sunday morning. Around midnight, when I was sound asleep, the hurricane finally came ashore around Biloxi as a Category 1. Basically they had about 30 minutes of significant wind and some flooding. It was a bit worse to the east around Mobile where there were more power outages, but in general this storm was more of a nuisance than anything else.

Nice weather for Sunday's ride out to the Spillway.

As it turned out, we never got much rain, or wind even. Nothing even approaching a normal summer afternoon thunderstorm, really. The power never went out, the streets never flooded, the party on Bourbon Street never stopped. I felt strangely disappointed even though I had made only the most minimal of preparations. I took the fern plant and chair cushions inside from the front porch and put the barbecue pit in the garage. Candy had taken the opportunity to stockpile food and water and after work on Friday we'd made a special trip to Whole Foods on Broad to buy more water. I have no idea why. We could survive for weeks just on the wine, beer and soft drinks already in the house. Anyway, I sent out a FB post Saturday evening to the Tulane group, and later to the NOBC group, saying I'd be riding the levee at 7 am on Sunday since I was pretty sure that various lakefront floodgates would still be closed and that Lakeshore Drive would probably be pretty wet.

Sunday morning Elliot, Jerry and Grayson showed up and we did a really nice ride up the river to the Spillway and back, which got me around 55 miles, so I felt satisfied with that even though it would turn out to be one of the lowest mileage weeks I'd had in a while. It wasn't even particularly windy. I spent the afternoon trimming hedges and trees at home, from which my back will probably not recover until Wednesday.