Ride it Out

Nice weather for the Friday morning Coffee Ride.

The weather this morning for the Friday Coffee Ride was so very nice. It was likely the last nice weather we'll see for a few days, though, because Tropical Storm Nate is making a bee-line for New Orleans right now, and doing so at 21 mph. This morning there was a pretty brisk ENE wind blowing, but the sky was clear and air was reasonably cool and dry. I would have liked to have ridden for another couple of hours since I'm going to be really mileage-deprived this week.

On Wednesday I rushed out of work a few minutes early, rode home, jumped in the car, and drove up to Baton Rouge to officiate the first race of the Track series at the velodrome. There was a healthy turnout of 23 riders and some really close finishes in the match sprints. Even with just 200 meter TTs for qualifying and then the double-elimination match sprints, I wasn't back home until around midnight. Then on Thursday I had to go right back to Baton Rouge for a morning meeting at the Board of Regents and didn't ride at all. These things always seem to happen this time of year.

I am hoping to get in a ride tomorrow morning, possibly some version of the Giro Ride, depending on which floodgates have been closed by then, but by midnight on Saturday it should be pretty much on top of us, possibly as a Category 1 hurricane by then. As hurricanes go, Category 1 isn't generally all that bad, but it's nothing to ignore either. Right now we're planning on being back at work as usual on Monday. At any rate, I expect that most of Saturday will be spent battening down whatever hatches we can at home, depending on how the situation looks at that point, and then "hunkering down" for the duration. I don't know who invented the term "hunkering," but I've never been able to come up with a more elegant way of saying what we do when we decide to ride out a hurricane at home. It's really more like waiting for the power to go out and then just hoping the roof doesn't get blown off.