Wayward WeMo, BSL Ride

Saturday in Mississippi

Last week seemed particularly disjointed, for multiple reasons. I headed out early Wednesday morning to meet up with the WeMoRi as usual. The temperature was still in the mid-70s and there was a significant east wind, neither of which should have caused any problem for the ride. There was, however, one little fly in the WeMo ointment. That film crew is still working around one of the houses on Lakeshore Drive, and even at 6 am there are lots of people there and the road is barricaded - some days more than others. Each morning, it's a roll of the dice whether a bunch of bikes can slip throught the cracks in the barricades. On the assumption that the group was able to do its usual route, I went out to Lakeshore Drive, looped around the fountain circle, and made my way back to Marconi, looking expectedly over my shoulder for the flickering headlights of the WeMoRi that usually appear right about 6:10 am. Well, 6:10 came and went, and still no lights. I hovered around for a little while, but soon abandoned hope and turned back down Marconi, assuming I'd be doing a lap around the park alone. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, an three-person group of Steve, Marurizio, and Sam came flying by, so I latched onto whatever scant draft there was at the back. When we hit the Wisner overpass, though, Sam and/or Maurizio attacked it, opening a gap on Steve, to whose wheel I was desperately clinging. Despite Steve's heroic effort, we never quite made contact with the lead duo again, and by the time we were nearing Lakeshore Drive again, Steve was toast and turned off onto LSD westbound to head home, leaving me to my own devices. I eventually found out what had happened that morning. It seems the police were particularly lively that morning and had prevented the group from continuing down Lakeshore Drive, so the riders decided to do two laps around City Park to make up the difference. Somehow that kind of shattered what there was of the group, and the timing was such that they were on Toussaint as I was hitting Lakeshore Drive, so I missed them entirely. Anyway, it was kind of a mess. 

On Thursday there was a 10 mph NNW wind, but at least we had a few riders on hand for the long ride out to the casino and back. I think Maurizio was on the front about 80% of the time, but it still didn't feel like an easy ride. The bike path along the lake was pretty wet from levee runoff, so although it didn't rain on us, there was a fair amount of wheelspray to deal with, and I got home kind of wet and grimy for at least the second time that week. 

Friday threw another monkey wrench into the works, at least for me, because I had to work a Tulane conference that started at 8 am. On the plus side, I was able to slip away around 3 pm for a few miles on the levee. By then the weather was pretty nice, with just a bit of a northeast wind. I rode out to the upriver end of Jefferson Parish where it's been barricaded since last Spring. I thought I could see some torn up levee in the distance, but at any rate, the section right at the parish line is still completely untouched. Riding back downriver I saw an eagle dive down below the batture trees along the river and then come back up with a fish, flying almost directly over me before deciding to perch atop one of the big metal power line posts to eat its catch.

I had been considering doing a little informal gravel ride over in Mississippi on Saturday to try out the new tires I'd put on the 'cross bike, but when I pulled out my MTB shoes I discovered that the sole was separating from the rest of the shoe and decided maybe that wouldn't be a good idea. Luckily, I found a pair of last year's Bont MTB shoes on sale on the Bont site and ordered them. Ordering directly from Bont pretty much guarantees I won't seem them for another week or so. Amazon they are not. So as a result, and in consideration of all of the missed mileage I'd already accumulated that week, I decided to do the 73-mile ride out of Bay St. Louis (more or less) that Steve M had lined up.

So Saturday morning I headed for Mississippi, stopping briefly at the relatively new Starbucks along I-10 in Slidell. Crossing the 5-mile bridge, the temperature was around 65°, but by the time I-10 headed east for Mississippi, it had dropped to around 55°. No surprise, of course, as I was expecting to see something around 54° for the start. On the plus side, there wasn't a cloud in the sky, and the wind was fairly light, relatively speaking. We had I think nine riders for this ride, and as usual it was mostly smooth enough paceline that you could enjoy the scenery. Toward the end a couple of riders started to come off the back on the little climbs, so we waited a few times at intersections for them to catch up. It was a pretty nice ride, so I was glad I'd made the trip. Sunday was a regular Giro day for me. We had a good enough group, a bit smaller than usual I'd say, but still enough to allow for some recovery time at the back. Rob was kind of pushing the pace on the way out along Hayne and Paris, but turned off at Chef, after which things kind of settled down a bit. I was feeling fine, the prior day's ride not having left much of a mark for some reason. This morning, Monday, however, I was feeling like crap, possibly due to too much wine the prior evening, or maybe just accumulated stress, so I quickly dropped back to a spot where the draft was wider. The Mellow Monday pace wasn't particularly fast, so that strategy worked out fine, which is to say I survived. 

Adams Street, a couple of blocks away. A long and winding road?

The forecast for tonight and tomorrow is not encouraging. From 5 am through 8 am the probability of rain goes from a dismal 98% to an equally dismal 84%, so it's likely to be a rain day until the next cold front blows in around noon and the winds shift around to the north again, which means cold and wind for Wednesday and especially Thursday and Friday. It looks like we will be riding the meteorological roller coaster for a while, with cold fronts followed by warming followed by cold fronts. Nothing below 50°F for the next ten days, though, so it'll just be a matter of dealing with rain and wind.