Best Made Plans

Out at the Spillway on Saturday

Random unpredictable rain showers have become the new normal around here lately. It was raining at 5:30 am last Saturday, so I turned off the alarm on the assumption that there wouldn't be a Giro Ride that day. Naturally I was wrong, kind-of. It looks like a decent group actually did the ride. By the time I got out of bed the rain had stopped and it looked like there would be a pretty nice window for riding, so around 9:30 I pulled out the old Orbea with its heavier tires and headed for the levee. My plan was to ride out to the Spillway, which would get me around 50 miles, and be back home before the rain inevitably started again. The river level was noticeably lower as I headed upriver, and soon the sun came out. I guess I had a bit more tailwind than anything else, so it was an easy ride out to the Spillway where, as usual, there were a few people taking selfies of themselves. With the river level dropping, I could see that they had already closed a number of the bays, and I wondered how much longer it would be before they closed everything back up again.

I was probably about half-way back when it started to rain. I'd taken the Orbea because I figured there was a good chance I'd get rained on and since I'd just put a new headset on the Bianchi I wanted to avoid washing all of the grease out of the "sealed" bearings just yet. Fortunately it was warm and the rain wasn't too heavy, and by the time I was getting closer to town it had stopped altogether. I thought I was in the clear at that point, but once again I was wrong. I came down off of the levee and made my way to Carrollton, just a mile from home, when it started raining again. When I turned onto Pine Street, a few blocks from the house, I could see a solid curtain of heavy rain just up the road. The last couple of blocks were in pouring rain. Perfect.

Well, at least it will roll now!

Later that day I went out to the garage and put the wheels back on the old GT-6. Phil had helped me find some relatively inexpensive tires and had mounted them up at the Porsche of Metairie shop for me a few days earlier. The old tires had been flat and rotted out since the car has been sitting there rusting away for nearly 20 years. It was time to at least get it to the point where it would roll because if I don't repair the front part of the garage where the termites and rot have eaten away a fair part of the roof and pretty much all of the corner posts, it's going to fall down on top of the car which will be even more of a mess. The car is, of course, in pretty rough shape, and it will be a minor miracle if I can get it running again. The disc rotors and rear brake drums were rusty but I did manage to get the wheels to turn, however reluctantly. I'll have to see what I can do to clean out the fuel system and carburetors, clean up the plugs and points, get a battery, and see if the starter will (a) work and (b) turn the engine over. It's going to take some time, I think, regardless, but it's a start.

The Orbea ready to go

After that I pulled out the old Cervelo and started packing it up for the flight to Seattle/Olympia. We'll be visiting Danielle for a few days and I figured I'd try and bring a bike this time since otherwise I'd be missing 5 days of riding. I then decided to go ahead and just use an unpadded bike bag and hope for the best. That bag is at least 35 years old. I put pipe insulation around the main tubes, pulled out the seatpost, removed the pedals, and removed the bars from the stem (although they're still hanging by the cables). I braced the fork ends and rear dropouts and put a little protection around the rear derailleur, so as long as it doesn't get dropped from ten feet off the ground, or smashed underneath some heavy luggage, it has a reasonable chance of survival. There's still a fair amount of room in there since it's a small bike. I have access to a rather large hard case that wouldn't even require removal of the rear wheel, but it would be a pain to deal with since we'll  have to get from long-term parking to the terminal, and then on the other end from the terminal to a shuttle to the rental car place and then get everything into the rental, and then repeat it all on the way back. It will be much easier to carry the bike in the bag, which probably weighs under 40 pounds altogether, than to roll around the old case that weighs about 35 pounds empty and would take up a lot of space in shuttles and cars.

Matt's saddle came loose on the Sunday Giro.
Pretty sure manufacturers compete to see who can
design the most complicated saddle clamp.

Anyway, the weather on Sunday was much improved and we were able to do a fairly good Giro Ride. I felt like my solo Spillway ride had taken a bit of a toll, though, and by Monday morning I was more than ready for an easy ride. There's this one sign out on the batture near LaRose that always goes under the water when the river is high. As soon as the water reaches the bottom of the sign, I know they will start talking about opening the spillway. As soon as it recedes below the bottom, I know they will start talking about closing it. Well, when I'd gone past there on Saturday I noted that the water had finally dropped below the bottom of the sign. Not coincidentally, Sunday morning was the first day since late February that my Garmin  hadn't given me a river flood warning when I went out to ride. On Monday the Corps announced that they were planning on closing the Spillway.

This morning it was raining pretty good in the early morning hours, so when the alarm went off at 5:30 I just stayed in bed for another half hour. By then the rain had stopped and the radar looked good, so I went out a bit later than usual, again on the Orbea because I knew the roads would still be pretty wet. I ran into Mignon out around the pipes, so I turned back with her a little earlier than planned. There's a cool front moving through some time this afternoon, so the forecast for this evening is calling for a 95% chance of rain between 4 and 6 p.m. so I went ahead and took the car to work. That alone may have been enough to ensure it won't actually be raining at 5:00, but frankly I am getting a little tired of riding in the rain.

After the Hurrication

Nice ride in a light rain on a day that could have been a hurricane day

Tropical Storm / Hurricane Barry was kind of a bust for us here in New Orleans, but the torrential rain and flooding that preceded it on Wednesday is still causing headaches. You wouldn't have thought that from watching the national news and weather channel, though. At least we got a nice little two-day hurrication out of it since the school closed down on Thrusday and Friday in anticipation of whatever they thought might happen. There were predictions of more heavy rain and street flooding, the Mississippi River overflowing the levees, Lake Pontchartrain overflowing the levees, etc. In the end, we had three days of somewhat rainy weather and a bit of wind here and there, but for the most part the bad weather ended up well to our west. The only excitement for us was on Saturday when a dangling static wire atop the phone pole in front of the neighbor's house got blown around in the wind and shorted against one of the secondary lines making for some sparks and ultimately breaking the secondary line, which remained hung up in the oak tree. None of us even lost power as a result and Entergy patched it up pretty quickly. The rest of the day was pretty boring since the tropical storm was just sitting out there in the Gulf. By Sunday morning it was clear we wouldn't be getting much of anything except light rain, and I eventually went out for a ride on the trusty old Pennine rain bike. Unfortunately I didn't take the time to pump up the tires since they felt "ok" to my thumb test, which apparently was entirely unreliable when dealing with those thick tires with Mr. Tuffy's in them. I rode a mile or so and decided to put some air in the rear tire, but all I had was a 40 year old Silca frame pump that did nothing but release more air. I ended up riding back home on the flat, pumping it up at home, and going back out for what turned out to be a pretty nice ride on the levee in a light drizzle.

Sundown just before the last race of the day on the lakefront on Wednesday

So although I missed riding on Saturday, things were pretty much back to normal on Monday. The ground floor of the Tidewater building on Canal St. was kind of a mess with sheetrock being torn out and blowers all over the place, but that's practically an annual routine nowadays. Before heading in to work I went over to visit Phil at Porche of New Orleans so he could mount tires on the wheels of the old GT-6 that's been sitting in the garage for about twenty years. I'd pulled the wheels off before the storm but figured I'd wait until things were settled down first. So now I just need to see how far I want to go down that particular rabbit hole. I guess I'll clean out the fuel system and carburetors, clean up the plugs and points, get a battery, and see if the engine will actually turn over. That will kind of determine where I go from there. If it looks like it's reasonably salvageable I'll then think about brakes, hydraulics, clutch, etc., etc. It would be cool to get it running again, but it's in pretty rough shape after all that time.

Yesterday was the last of the 4-race weekday Pontchartrain Beach Summer Series out at the lakefront. Race #3 had been cancelled because of the weather but the forecast looked fine for this one. I was scheduled to officiate with Michelle. Candy had to take the car to work for an early meeting, so I rode the bike to work and would then put the bike in the car, drive back to the house, load up all of the stuff, and drive out to the lakefront. Around mid-afternoon Townsend called to tell me someone had stolen his generator from in front of his house where he'd left if for a few minutes so the spilled gasoline could evaporate. Fortunately my generator was sitting in the basement full of gas. I left work around 4 p.m. and got out to the lake around 5:15, so that worked out OK. We got the first race done as a big black thunderstorm started building to the west. There was no telling if it would expand over us or not, but fortunately all we got was some drizzle during the second race. Guess I got home around 9 pm or so, ate half of a leftover frozen pizza, and put the results on the LAMBRA website after checking out the last 10 km or so of the Tour de France.

Lack of Confidence Storm

Lots of variation for something so close

Well, here we go with an early start to hurricane season. Rather unexpectedly on Wednesday morning a big low pressure area that was heading south toward the Gulf kicked off some truly exceptional lightning, thunder and rain that totally overwhelmed the pumping system and temporarily flooded many areas of the city. Since it was pouring down rain when I'd normally go to work I opted to stay home, which turned out to be a good call. My the middle of the day the shit had hit the fan. Tulane shut down for the duration, but by the time Candy got out of the Tidewater building on Canal Street the bottom floor of the building had over a foot of water in it and of course the elevators were not running. The streets were already flooded, so driving downtown to pick her up was not an option. She decided to walk home the long way, down St. Charles Avenue, since the other options through mid-city were probably going to be pretty bad.

Wednesday, downtown

I made an attempt to meet her in the car on St. Charles but didn't get more than a quarter mile before turning back. Broadway was flooded down around Willow and there was a power line that was down there so the street was closed. I knew South Claiborne would be six feet deep at State and Nashville, so there really wasn't any safe way to get there. Unfortunately, when I got in the car I discovered that the floor was soaking wet. The driver's side window hadn't been all the way up, so water had been getting in throughout the day.  The house was high and dry here on the Neron Knoll as I call it, so after a while I got on the bike and rode down Broadway, which by then was passable, and met her on St. Charles around Louisiana. By then the pumps were starting to catch up and the rain was slacking off. Thanks to the spectacular amount and intensity of the rain, our next-door neighbor had water pouring into his kitchen from a gap above a window where a badly installed gutter was allowing water to pour down the side of the house. Another neighbor down the block now has a blue tarp over part of his roof, so I guess he discovered a new leak as well.

The river level up toward Destrehan somewhere this morning. Lots of levee still in reserve.

Unfortunately, that was all just a prelude to development of a tropical storm once the low got past the coast and into the warm Gulf waters. The storm tracks were, and still are, all over the place. Even now, on Thursday evening, there's still very little confidence in any of the models. It could go to the west, it could go right over us, it could even go to the east of us. Whatever, everyone's expecting a lot of rain in the Friday-Saturday timeframe and possibly well into Sunday. Although the low-lying areas south of the city are being evacuated, most people are staying in town for this one, I think.  Looking out the window I can see that the winds have picked up considerably over the past couple of hours and are around 15 mph from the ENE. That northern component is still pulling in some slightly drier air, and the sun has been out most of the day.

This morning I went out later than usual since I didn't have to go in to work. I saw the 6 am group heading back after obviously turning back a little early. The sun was shining and the wind wasn't bad, so I ended up going all the way out to Ormond and back. It wasn't much of a workout, really. I always have trouble pushing myself when I'm riding by myself.

As I'm writing this, the city is sending out an official Tropical Storm Warning, not to be confused with a "watch." There's been a lot of concern about the river as well. It's still running near flood stage where it's been for a couple of months, and with the expected southeast wind from the storm they are anticipating a surge up to 19 feet (flood stage it 16 at this gauge). Riding along the levee this morning it's clear that the river is, at the moment, lower than it's been in at least a month. The batture is still mostly flooded, and I stopped during my ride to watch a big alligator cruising along between the levee and the trees, but in most places the water is just at or below the foot of the man-made levee.

The next couple of days should be interesting.

Mid-summer in the Mid-south

The July 4th Giro Ride

Last week was hot, and as my monthly electricity bill glides above the $250 mark, thanks to certain members of the household who insist on chilling the bedroom to 68 degrees when it's 85 outside and then sleeping under a comforter, everyone is starting to feel the burn. The 4th of July saw a fairly big group show up for a "holiday Giro" ride, and despite the 7 a.m. starting time it was already scorching by the time I got back home a bit before 10. I was happy to get in the workout, of course, but it took me a few hours in the air-conditioning to recover.

After an easy ride on Friday, I was looking at a double-Giro weekend since there didn't seem to be much else on offer and my afternoons were going to be booked anyway. I've been doing most of my rides with just two small water bottles because they're so much easier to deal with in my small 50cm Bianchi frame. In fact, even a small bottle scrapes along the underside of the top tube when I pull it out of the seat tube cage. I think it's about time to switch to the big bottles, at least for the down tube cage, though, because I'm easily going through all my water on a 2.5 hr. ride despite the 1970's ear water-rationing habit I acquired back when big water bottles didn't even exist. Saturday's Giro turned out to be pretty fast despite the temperature, which was well into the 90 by the time I got home. I think we averaged over 26 mph on the way out. As often happens this time of year, the pace on the return trip was considerably slower in response to the temperature which was considerably higher. To complicate things, the group had two flats on the way back, and I use the term "group" loosely in this case since a fair contingent didn't stick around for both of them.

Once I got my moderately dehydrated self back home I decided it was going to be my only chance for a while to cut down some more of the little trees and stuff that have grown up along I barely made a dent in the problem, I managed to go through about five cans of soft drinks in the process, an amount that clearly left me with a hydration deficit for the rest of the evening.

Saturday's Giro heading out on Lakeshore Drive before the heat had taken its toll

So after flirting with heat exhaustion all day Saturday I naturally headed out again Sunday morning for the third Giro Ride in four days, fueled by a cup of Starbucks iced coffee super-saturated with sugar. It would prove to be insufficient. Although the Sunday group was smaller than Saturday's, which I'd estimate to have been around 45, you couldn't tell from the pace on the way out. With three or four TT bikes and a light tailwind, just staying in the paceline behind the rotation would prove to be a more than adequate workout. I showed the same 26+ mph average for the outward bound 15 or 18 or whatever mile stretch. It was, however, even hotter than Saturday and with fewer riders I was definitely doing more work, although you'll just have to take my word for it since my hrm battery gave out along the way.

The return trip was a whole different story, though. I think that everyone must have been pretty burned out. As I usually do at the turnaround, I started back at an easy pace while the rest of the crew hung out for a minute under shade of the solitary little tree out there in the Venetian Isles marshland that has miraculously not been killed by urine poisoning. There were a couple of riders up ahead somewhere, but I wasn't in a hurry since I knew the bunch would be coming up on me from behind pretty soon anyway as usual. I soon found myself in a 3-rider group with a rider on a TT bike and Mike Williams, also on a TT bike (this was after Mike had passed me with the comment, "That all ya got?")  Now, being in a group with two riders on TT bikes, and fully expecting the group to come flying past at 30 mph at any moment, I wasn't taking any pulls. Every now and then I'd look back, surprised that I couldn't see the group yet. We rode like that at a fairly steady 24 mph all the way to I-510, and I still couldn't see the group. I figured someone must have flatted or something. The other two rider inexplicably went straight on Chef, but I turned onto 510 which is the normal route, and backed off to a leisurely pace as I waited for the missing group which finally showed up. As it turned out, nobody had flatted. They had just reached a group consensus to take it easy.

Not exactly pin-point accuracy at the moment

So once again I got back home pretty dehydrated. A few hours later We went over to Audubon Zoo for the welcoming party for the new Psychiatry Residents. It was held in the outside party area that the Zoo rents out, which thankfully has a roof and fans and food and drink and, in this case, snoballs. Even so, and despite my best efforts to not move from my chair, it was another few hours of being hot and sweaty, albeit with the occasional glass of wine and cup of snoball and hot-dog and salad.

I think I fell asleep around 8:30.

Mike's page is always entertaining because he gets
so excited about this stuff.

Meanwhile, the weather forecasters are getting excited about the first potential tropical depression, which is expected to maybe develop in the northern Gulf in a few days once the big high pressure area that has been causing all this heat starts to move out of the way. At the moment, all bets are off for Thursday through Saturday. Could be fine. Could be rain. Could be a tropical depression. Could be a Tropical Storm. It just depends on which computer model you like this year.

No Plans

Tomorrow is the 4th of July, which means I'll be off from work. At the moment, I have no plans to do anything in particular, and don't really know exactly when I'll be riding. Do I get up early and see if anybody shows up at the usual Thursday morning 6 am time? Do I sleep late and go out whenever I want, which will undoubtedly be even hotter than 6 am? Is there some local quasi-organized ride that will materialize between now and then?  Who knows?

Why did the turtle cross the bike path?

I'm thinking maybe I'll ride the levee up to the spillway, which is STILL open. They're supposed to start closing it soon, but I swear this has to be the longest time I've ever seen the river remain at such a high level around here. My Garmin has been showing me a flood warning alert every time I've turned it on since around February, I think. The river has been very slowly going down and some sections of batture are exposed again. Last Saturday, after coming up short mileage-wise when I stopped to help with an early flat on the Giro Ride, I put in a few extra miles on the levee to make up the difference. They were pretty easy miles, so I got to look at the scenery a bit more than usual. In addition to the usual assortment of Herons and ducks and things, I spotted one big alligator and watched a snapping turtle climb up the levee and across the bike path toward the river. The nice thing about a high river is that you get to see a lot more wildlife along the batture.

Our little post-Tour get-together at Wrong Iron was pretty nice. A number of people actually showed up and we went through more than a few pitchers of beer. We has a surprise appearance of Stan Truxillo who was in town from Texas for some sort of family thing. Chip Eyman, Adam Watts, Stan and I spent way too long talking about old-people stuff like which medications work best, reading glasses, hearing aids and other timely issues of the day. Stan was club president for a while, as I recall, back in the 80s. Adam owns Bicycle World and promoted the last Race Across Louisiana. Chip is a long-time member who broke a hip in that race and helps out with the Tour road race. Anyway, it was a fun evening despite the occasional cigar smoke and afternoon heat, and I think maybe we'll have to do it again.

Sunday Giro Ride heading out on Lakeshore Drive. It was damned hot by the time we got back.

The Wednesday evening 4-race lakefront series is halfway through right now, taking a week off for the holiday. It's been a bit of a rush to get out there to officiate them, but fortunately the weather has been OK for the last two and I don't think we've screwed up the results too badly. I have been experimenting with a couple of LED work lights that I bought to help with the finish camera since it's pretty dark by the time the last of the three races ends. Although the images are still pretty dark, the numbers were all readable, so that's definitely an improvement. Other than that, I've just been doing the routine rides during the week and the Giro Rides on the weekends. There isn't a road race on the schedule until August, which makes it hard for me to stay motivated. I always did best in the years when I was racing three or four weekends every month. Here we are in July already and I think I've only really raced four or five times all year, and some of those were pretty low key.

When a hot wire hits the ground.

So the other day I was coming home from work on the bike, crossing South Claiborne Avenue, when I saw something odd. There had been a big thunderstorm with lots of lightning earlier in the day, and I'd gotten a notification from Entergy that the power at my house had been out. A while later I got another notice that it was back on. Anyway, I'm crossing S. Claiborne where there's this little house that's kind of behind my back yard and has been abandoned since Katrina in 2005, and I see this huge section of high voltage cable hanging from the tree. I rode up to it to have a closer look and I could see that it had dug a hole in the ground when it was still live, and also had set the fence alongside the house on fire, burning up a ten-foot section entirely. Down the street I could see Entergy trucks working way up on the poles. People have stolen sections of the copper ground wires from almost every pole along S. Claiborne, which I suspect is not a good thing in the event of a lightning strike, which is what had clearly happened. Later that evening I discovered that one of the two little TV cable boxes wasn't working. The cable line comes from the same pole, so I guess that's what blew it out. Luckily the TVs and internet and everything else seemed to be working fine. I ended up having to drive out to Metairie to get a replacement box from Cox, a process that went surprisingly smoothly.

No helmet, no jersey, on the old Pennine

Last week someone mentioned the Heart o' Dixie triathlon and it reminded me of when I did it way back around 1980 or 81. I think it's the oldest triathlon in the country now. Anyway, when I went looking for the website I stumbled upon a photo I'd never seen before showing me on the bike there. I had been convinced to go do the race the day before and hadn't been swimming in a couple of years, but I'd been doing a little bit of running in the off-seasons. I finished 10th that year because triathlons were so new back then that there weren't really any dedicated triathletes. Also, the ride was fairly long and it was point-to-point. I finished the ride I guess five to ten minutes ahead of the next person, but my shoes hadn't arrived yet at the gas station that served as the transition area, so by the time I started the run six or seven people were already up the road, and a few more passed me as I shuffled through the run and onto the horse racing track at the fairgrounds.

Meanwhile, Facebook and Instagram seem to be having major problems today. I wonder if we'll ever find out what the real problem was, or is.