Out of the Cone

Track keeps shifting west

Hurricane Delta's forecast track has shifted west now, putting New Orleans outside of the "cone." That's good for us, but not so good for Lake Charles and generally southwest Louisiana where they are still trying to recover from the last hurricane, Laura. In fact, New Orleans still has over a thousand people from around there who are staying in hotels until they are able to have a place to go back to. Yesterday we made the call to reschedule the Tour de La to October 24. Even if the weather here isn't too bad on Saturday, it still won't be what you'd want to have for a race. Also, since it is serving as the LAMBRA Road Championship, having it this weekend would probably exclude riders from southwest Louisiana where there are likely to be some significant impacts from the hurricane. It's still expected to make landfall west of Vermilion Bay as a Category 3 hurricane by late Friday afternoon, so somewhere between Lake Charles and Lafayette. Still hoping it will settle down to something below Category 3 by then, but for now the forecast is Cat. 3.

Although we had some light sprinkles of rain yesterday evening and early this morning, the weather here today is nice. Of course, the humidity is back in full force and it's a little breezy, but the sun is out and we're not expecting any rain until maybe tomorrow afternoon. Although we'll be on the "wet" side of the hurricane, you never know just how wet that will be, but at least the forecast for us keeps improving with each iteration.

This morning I dragged myself out to the WeMoRi, which this time of year is about half in the dark and finishes about fifteen minutes before sunrise at 6:57 am. It was kind of an odd one today. As usual, I was on Marconi between Lakeshore Drive and Robert E. Lee when, first, a 3-rider break came flying past. I decided not to try to get on with them and wait for the pack, which maybe wasn't the best move, because it seemed like forever before the pack came up to me. I slid into the front half on RE Lee just as one of the tall guys took a flyer off the front. A moment later he was on the ground, having slid out on the wet corner at Wisner. Most of us stopped to make sure he was OK, which he was. That kind of broke things up a bit and some of us had to chase for a bit down Wisner to get back into the shelter of the group. Then, as we were heading back north toward the lakefront on Marconi at Harrison we came to the stoplight, which was red for us, but also red for the cars coming from the left (they never put that light cycle back to normal after they changed it back when they were rebuilding the Wisner overpass), so the front of the group kept going. Just as they got into the intersection the light for the Harrison Avenue traffic turned green and somebody in a big pickup towing a horse trailer or something just hit the gas despite the fact that there were bike riders still crossing in front of him or her. It was clearly a punishment move. Anyway, the back half of the group had to slam on the brakes until the trailer passed, which meant another little chase to regain the group, which fortunately wasn't really going all that hard anyway. At some point after that someone (Blake on his track bike?) rolled off the front and stayed there to the end. The main group got fast for the last mile or two, but that was about it.