Water and Weather and Fourteen Years

Inside the Lafitte drainage canal.  Yes, that's a car down there. Probably floated in during the Katrina flood
fourteen years ago.

Today is the 14th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina's landfall, and although for the most part things have been back to normal for years, we're still picking up the pieces here and there. To nobody's surprise the underground drainage canals in New Orleans are a mess. After a big and somewhat unexpected flood event back in July where areas of the city that don't usually flood, did, the Sewerage and Water Board started looking for answers.

Pulling a Mazda out of the underground canal

What they found about a week ago, were entire cars and tons of other debris, including other car parts, shopping carts, bicycles, etc., stuck in the Lafitte canal. That was probably just the tip of the iceberg, though. A big SELA project that took years to finish and that added some huge underground drainage canals along Jefferson and Louisiana are now being looked at as contributing factors, pushing more water into the system than it can handle. Less than a week after pulling the car out of the drainage canal, there was another flood event last Monday. I was sitting in the office looking at the torrential rain and watching the iron manhole covers along Poydras Street across from the Superdome get blown up into the air as high-pressure backed-up water gushed out from underneath them. By 5 pm there was a lot of flooding downtown. I'd taken the car to work because of the rain forecast and although it was safely parked on the third floor of the Tidewater parking garage, the exit to the garage was flooded, as was LaSalle street, so Candy was afraid to try and get out of the garage to pick me up. Instead, we decided to take the Tulane shuttle home and leave the car where it was. Candy walked over through the rain as we waited for the shuttle that was itself stuck in flood-induced gridlock. When it finally arrived, it was full. By then the rain had about stopped so we thought we'd walk back to the garage and see if we could take the car. We got a couple of blocks when we saw another shuttle coming, so we ran back there and squeezed onto that one, which still had to make its way over to Tidewater and the Med School and the Hospital, etc. I don't think we got home until around 7:30, but at least the waters had receded by then and the walk from campus to the house was uneventful, which to say I arrived with dry feet.

That's a lot of bugs. Smelled like dead fish.

Last weekend was affected by the rain as well. We had planned a nice 60-something mile ride on the northshore, starting at 7 am, which actually turned out to be quite nice...and dry... even though the turnout was a little low.

A little stretch as we got going after the Pine store stop. Always a few Tri riders on these Northshore rides.

I picked up Haoting, aka "Frank" before 6, stashing his entire bike in the back of the Volvo, with my bike on the roof. Driving across the causeway we were continuously pelted with swarms of Midges requiring five of six windshield washer attempts. By the time we arrived at the Lee Road ballpark, my bike was literally slimy with thousands of dead midges plastered on all of the leading surfaces. Fortunately I found a water hose over by the rest rooms and was able to clean most of it off before the ride.  It was a nice moderately paced ride for the most part, perhaps a bit easier than I'd have liked, so on the way back when we got to the "Watchtower hill" climb, just past Enon and where there isn't a watchtower any more, I kept a little pressure on the pedals which split a few of us off the front. At that point we were only maybe five or six miles from the end of the ride, and indeed that last stretch is traditionally where anyone with anything left has carte blanche to go hard, which we kinda did.

Dark clouds brought rain ten miles later

On Sunday I went out to the Giro Ride. Looking at the radar, I wondered if I'd just be having a cup of coffee and then riding back home in the rain, but eventually a pretty good-sized group turned up and we headed out. The sky, however, was clearly threatening, and by the time we turned onto Paris Road we could see the rain in the distance. A lot of people turned off at Lake Forest to avoid the rain, but a fair number of us continued on. Naturally we got soaked on Chef Highway, both going and coming, but by the time we got back to Lakeshore Drive the street was practically dry, so basically we had strategically ridden right to the only rain in the area. Regardless, it was a nice enough ride that got me a second consecutive 250+ mile week.

Hope this turns north after crossing Florida

So right now we're looking at a hurricane, Dorian, headed for Florida. The forecast tracks are still kind of all over the map but it looks like it will have built up to Cat. 2 or even 3 by the time it makes landfall around Monday. We had a little, and by that I mean very little, cool front come through last night that dropped the humidity down a notch and treated us to the first sub-80+ degree morning we've had in quite a while, not that it lasted much past sunrise. That front is, hopefully, going to force the hurricane north after it crosses Florida, if it crosses Florida, well before it gets close to New Orleans ... or maybe not.  Nobody's making any promises just yet. Jay and Laura are staying in Orlando, which at the moment is basically right under the center of the probability track, although usually by the time hurricanes get that far inland they've weakened considerably.  Anyway, perhaps because of the relatively nice weather we had a relatively good turnout with about a dozen riders for the 6:00 a.m. levee ride. As usual a lot of them turned back early but Rich and Matt continued on with me, and we picked up Dave and Steve along the way, so it was a pretty decent workout.

Tomorrow morning will be the first 6:30 a.m. Tulane cycling coffee ride of the semester. Should be interesting to see who shows up. On Tuesday I helped pick up a bike from Bicycle World that one of the students had shipped via BikeFlights. His pedals were missing, naturally. The shop had received another bike for another Tulane student the same day, and that one was missing its front wheel. Anyway, we went over to HQ where I "borrowed" a pair of Shimano road pedals from one of the TUCA bikes until Max gets his own pedals.

Giro Weekend - Catching up on Projects

The Saturday Giro Ride heading out on Lakeshore Drive

The only thing predictable about the weather around here lately is that it will be hot and humid. If you happen to be underneath one of the randomly located rain showers, it's slightly less of the former and a lot more of the latter. There was actually considerably less rain, at least where I happened to be, than I'd expected, though, so that was good. I had a long list of little projects I was hoping to get done over the weekend, so I knew from the outset it was going to be a double Giro Ride weekend for me.

Paola hanging out at the back of
the Giro group probably
wondering what she'd gotten
herself into

I'd heard from an incoming Tulane business school student from Mexico who was starting an exchange semester a couple of days earlier. She was interested in doing the Giro on Saturday, so I sent her all of the usual information, including a Strava link, so she'd know what she was getting into. She had just brought her TT/Tri bike but seemed confident enough about riding in the group. I arrived at Starbucks Saturday morning around 6:30 as usual, and a few minutes later a car, I assume an Uber or something, pulled up and Paola and her bike emerged. I introduced myself and a after a while Noel and all of the usual suspects started arriving. Paola and Noel got to talking in Spanish, so that was good. Anyway, as the group rolled along Lakeshore Drive I dropped back and warned Paola that it was going to get really fast as soon as we came down the second overpass onto Hayne Blvd. It did. In fact, it was a bit faster than usual. That was the last I saw or her, but looking back on Strava I could see that she hung in pretty well until, near the end of Hayne, the speed surged up to 32 mph. It turned out to be a really fast Giro Ride, averaging over 26 mph with a 34 mph maximum out to Venetian Isles. On the way back there was yet another flat, this time Brian Bourgeois, on Bullard. I swear, the Giro has about a 25% chance of making it down Lake Forest and Bullard without a flat lately. I wish the city would re-open the service road.

You can never have enough socket sets.

So after getting home I set about cleaning out the garage so that I could at least contemplate starting to work on the old Triumph. Lots of leaves and stuff blows in under the garage door, and there was a fair amount of other stuff in there that needed to be thrown out or cleaned up or just re-located. The best way to clean it out is with the leaf-blower, actually, so I put on a dust mask and blew out all of the accumulated dust, leaves, and even one dead mummified rat. Once it was cleaned out a bit I took a look under the hood and noticed that the coolant level seemed really low, and since I had some right there, I poured about half a gallon into the radiator before I noticed the steady stream of it running across the garage floor. The end of one of the heater lines had broken where it was attached to the rubber tubing. On the plus side, both carburetor pistons were free and I was able to turn the engine slightly with a wrench on the alternator nut, so at least I know the engine isn't frozen (there's lots of oil, so that's a plus). So I called it a day on that project.

Well, it was more than just a fuse.

I'd received some little fuses I'd ordered from Radio Shack for the NOBC P/A system that blew when we were in Jackson the prior week when it had gotten wet from a sudden rainstorm and Kenny unplugged and re-plugged the speakers while the power was on. The little fuse had blown and I was hoping that with everything dried out I could just replace it and all would be well. No such luck. As soon as I powered it on with the new fuse, it blew. Guess that will require a trip over to Galaxy Electronics to find out what the damage was. So with project 2 on hold, I loaded the big old bike case that I hadn't actually used for the trip to Olympia back into the car and took it back to University Square where TUCA "HQ" is. From there I went over to Lowes so I could make a couple of spare keys to the garage door since I'll likely be leaving tools and stuff in there as I start working on the GT-6. While I was there I decided to pick up a nice little Craftsman socket wrench set. It's been so long since I worked on an English car that I couldn't find many SAE sockets any more. Then, on the way home I stopped at O'Reily auto parts to get a few feet of heater hose and some hose clamps.

Not too bad for a year and a half or so.

That evening I broke down and removed the tape from the Bianchi's handlebar, somewhat afraid of what I would find underneath. Surprisingly, there wasn't much corrosion. I have a replacement 3T Ergosum handlebar on hand, so I'll probably go ahead and replace it anyway. The real reason, though, was to replace all of the brake and derailleur cables. They're actually working pretty well, but the rear brake cable housing is basically snapped off where it goes into the frame at the head tube ferrule. I'll probably tackle the rest of that project tonight.

The Sunday Giro Ride was considerably more tame than Saturday's had been, which is to say the average speed on the way out was a only 25.8 mph.  We weren't even to Chef, however, when the rain started. As has been typical lately, it was a short rain shower, but of course enough to get everyone fully soaked. By the time we were near the end of Chef Highway the street was dry. After the turnaround, I rolled past most of the group that was hanging out under the tree as usual. After a while a little group formed and we rode together waiting for the main group to overtake us, which surprisingly never happened. It turned out there had been a flat and a long delay somewhere on Chef Highway, so our little group rode all the way back without ever seeing anyone from the main group.

There's a significant rain threat in the forecast for the next couple of days, although I got in a nice easy Monday recovery ride this morning, and as of noon it still  hasn't rained despite the threatening sky. Tomorrow we're hoping to staff the Off-campus Move-in Fair in the vacant lot across from The Boot. Any significant rain is probably going to cancel that, however, so it's a wait-and-see thing right now. Then on Wednesday it move-in day for the new students on the uptown campus. I was hoping to get some help from whatever TUCA riders are in town but it's not looking like that's going to happen. I have a ton of USAC national championship brochures and some other stuff, so I may end up leaving that with Adam from Bicycle World who always has a tent in front of Bruff Commons for move-in day.

At the Crossroads

First new wheels in over a decade. Lipstick on a pig??

The long weekend started halfway through Friday. A few days before, Mike Lew over at Gray Cat Cycleworx had called to let me know my new wheels were ready. He had worked out a deal for me with Chris Mogridge at Mercury Cycling, and although it had been a bit of a long but not entirely unexpected wait, they were finally ready. Since the Crossroads Cycling Classic weekend, which included the LAMBRA road race championship, were being held that weekend up in Jackson, and since Hammond is on the way to Jackson, I packed up the car early Friday afternoon and headed for the shop. Now, you have to understand that a visit to Gray Cat is no trivial exercise where you run in, pick up something, pay, and run right back out. No, visits to Gray Cat should always be scheduled with the expectation that there will be a couple of hours of discussion with Mike covering everything from his most recent vintage bike acquisition (an anniversary Schwinn Paramount) to Spinachi aero bars (currently on his bike) to doping to the wereabouts of any number of long-lost local cyclists. Anyway, I knew it would take a while and that I'd probably run into a complication or two trying to squeeze these new wider carbon wheels and their 25 mm tires onto the old Bianchi Sempre that was designed for what, at the time, were standard width rims and standard width tires, neither of which seem to be standard any more. The wheels themselves looked great, and if I trust anyone to build racing wheels for me, it's Mike. We mounted the tires and changed the brake pads to carbon-specific ones. The SRAM 11-speed cassette worked fine with my Campi shifters, so no problems there. Now I had to re-adjust the brakes with the new pads, which meant opening them up as wide as they would go. That left about 1 mm of clearance between the tire and the Campi rear brake arm, but it was enough -- barely. I'd brought a wheel magnet, but of course forgot to put it on the rear wheel for my old-style chainstay mounted Garmin speed and cadence sensor.

I got to Dean's house (Dean is a moto-ref who lives in Jackson) where I'd been offered couch space, and met up with the other two officials, Ricky and Randy, after stopping in Brookhaven to eat at Broma's and pick up a couple of folding chairs since one of the LAMBRA ones had apparently disappeared.

It was fun while it lasted

We were out the door Saturday morning before 6 am to get things set up for the Jackson criterium. The course in downtown Jackson would be a bit different from last year since the city had installed a bunch of ridiculous road furniture in the middle of what used to be the finish straight. The only solution was to run the race in the opposite direction, leaving only about one block between the last turn and the finish. There was a heat advisory all weekend, and by the time I went to get into my race kit for my race I was already soaked from a combination of sweat and a brief rain shower. The rain shower had gotten something in the NOBC P/A system wet and it had stopped working entirely, leaving our announcer, Kenny Bellau, high and dry, but fortunately Ricky had brought the compact LAMBRA P/A system, so we eventually got Kenny back in business.

The Master's race had a reasonably good turnout that included Scott Kuppersmith and Frank Moak with four of their 601 Racing teammates, six Acadiana riders, and a handful of lone rangers like myself. I was still not quite back to normal from that upper respiratory cold I'd picked up in Olympia, so I was strictly in survival mode from the start trying to at least limit the impact on my lungs despite the occasional deep cough. I'd done a little warmup with the new wheels, which felt fine, so I didn't have any concerns there. The course was on old city streets where almost every one of the six corners featured a minefield of strategically placed potholes. Although I'm sure I could ride these new wide tires and rims at 75 psi under most conditions, under the circumstances I figured I'd go up to 90 psi with the expectation that I'd be slamming into a few sharp edges at speed. The race started out pretty fast with Scott launching right away and the field splitting. I was in basically the second group for most of the time, although even that split toward the end. Despite the road surface and fact that I was just tail-gunning, I was liking the course that featured a nice little one-block climb after the two-block generally downhill finish straight. A couple of laps into the race I looked down to see my Garmin showing 0 mph.  WTF??  Apparently it had paired with the speed sensor and for some reason was ignoring the GPS data. I actually re-started it during the race to no effect. Anyway, I was feeling pretty good and having no trouble staying with the little group I was in when, about four laps before the finish on the back stretch my front tire suddenly went "pffffft!"  It was like deja vu.  I'd flatted a front tire on the same road, but in the opposite direction, with three laps to go, the year before. This was a little different because it was clearly not the result of a pinch-flat. I rolled gingerly through the next few turns to the pit and put on my backup front wheel, only then realizing that there were no free laps since we were inside of 5 laps to go. Meanwhile, Peter had blown both tires on a pothole, and Frank had crashed when his handlebars slipped down after hitting another hole. My front brake, adjusted for the wide rims, didn't even touch my old aluminum rims, but it didn't really matter since I would just be riding out the last few laps by myself. I ended up 12th. Afterwards I took a close look at the wheel with the flat and realized that the non-adhesive rim strip had gotten folded over a bit when we'd mounted the tire, so eventually the tube got into one of the spoke holes and blew. I put in a new tube and carefully checked the rim strip before inflating it again. As they were last year, USADA showed up to do testing on selected riders, mostly the winners I think. Two riders from Alabama, husband and wife, tested positive at this race last year.

Hate it when races start with attacks like this!

Sunday's road races started at 8 am, although the masters race was in the second wave that didn't start until 10:30 or so. I was again fully dehydrated and hot from helping set up the finish area, radios, signage, etc. by the time I headed out for a little warmup. I'd put on a wheel magnet but right after I started riding the Garmin stopped showing speed. I looked down to see that it had slid down the spoke. As it turned out, that particular magnet couldn't be tightened enough on the thin aero spoke to stay put. Luckily I had another magnet that worked, and the Garmin was finally happy again. My plan for this race was pretty simple. Try not to get dropped on the hill on the back side, at least on the first lap, and ignore whatever else was going on at the front. Strictly survival mode.

See those 4 Acadiana guys?  Handwriting was already on the wall.

On the start line I could see the writing on the wall. Acadiana had plenty of matches to burn, and it was pretty obvious that they were employ their usual tactic, which is to start launching attacks from the gun, one after another, until something got away. Of course, knowing what is going to happen doesn't necessarily mean there's anything you can do about it. Hence, the first four miles were done at about 30 mph, and by the time we got to the first turn, maybe five miles in, Troy and Alex, both of Acadiana, were already off the front. There was some effort to chase, but with so many teammates in the small pack and the general lack of horsepower, I didn't figure we'd see them again. Back at the back, where I was for pretty much the whole race, someone looked over at me and asked, "Are they just going to let that go?"  I replied, "Well, it works for me!"

The sprint for the scraps

With the break off the front the pace had settled down a bit. It was still fairly fast and the break was still visible up the road. On the second of the three laps there was an attack on the 1 km long hill on the back side and the pack split with a couple of Acadiana guys trying to make the bridge up to the front break. They caught the break and at that point, with one lap to go, it seemed like our gap to the break had actually come down a bit. Soon, we could see that Trey and Troy had come off the back of the break and we caught them around the big hill on the back side. That meant that there were now just, I think, a couple of riders off the front, namely Kevin and Stephen, both from Acadiana. Then, just a couple of miles before the finish, Alex and Bronson went clear, leaving the rest to battle it out for 5th place. With a kilo to go I found myself on the wheel of a strong rider from Tuscaloosa who ended up giving me a nice little leadout. Then Butch jumped from behind to the left and I went to the right and the Tuscaloosa rider, Bernd, launched as well. Butch made it to the line ahead of us as Bernd and I drag-raced the last 50 meters side-by-side with me finishing ahead by barely a tire's width.

The old guys

So I went home feeling pretty good about the weekend. I hadn't had any expectations considering I was still recovering from a cold, and although I basically sucked wheels all weekend I felt better than I'd thought I would and it was generally a fun weekend. Unfortunately, it was also the last road race of the season around here. There should be some Track stuff happening later in the month, and I guess I'll be doing Six Gap again with the Tulane riders at the end of September, but I don't really have any plans racing-wise. Cyclocross starts up around mid-October, so who knows?

Rider Down

Up in the piney woods north of the lake

I'd been struggling with a cold ever since I was up in Olympia, and although I'd been riding I still had the occasional deep cough and lung congestion. The weekend weather was looking to be pretty nice, though, and when Mignon suggested getting a group together for a northshore ride I figured it was about time for me to jump back into the deep end. For some reason, the only southshore riders to show up, other than myself, were Mignon and Randy H. Maybe it was the 7 a.m. start time that put people off, although for an early August ride around here you'd think earlier would be better. Anyway, we headed across the lake a bit after 6 am and arrived a bit before 7 am to find a nice sized group at the Ballpark on Lee Road. We kind of rushed to get on the bike since we'd arrived a little late and everyone else was waiting on us. The planned route took us straight north through Enon to Pine, and from there up to Stateline road, which is not coincidentally near the town of Stateline, which is not coincidentally at the state line between Louisiana and Mississippi as originally defined by the northern border of West Florida, a kind of orphaned area north of the lake but east of the river that wasn't actually part of the Louisiana Purchase and was controlled by France or Spain or Great Britain, and for a while existed as its own Republic. But I digress. Suffice it to say that there's some great riding up there with quiet country roads and some nice rolling terrain. Anyway, it was just the kind of route I like - long stretches between turns, light traffic, and a few little hills.

Heading back south from Pine where there are a lot of Pine trees

As usually happens on these northshore rides, a number of riders split off at various points, leaving maybe ten of us to do the full ride, which was around 65 miles. The pace of this group was pretty steady, which was probably a good thing considering the status of my lungs. After crossing back over the Bogue Chitto river on the way back, with maybe six or seven miles to go, we came to Firetower Hill where there is no longer a fire tower, and someone started to put a little pressure on at the front. That ended up splitting the group and so the last section turned out to be the fastest of the day. I was glad to find that I still had plenty in reserve as the group got down to just four or five by the end.

Jim O'Daniel

So while we were playing in the hills of West Florida, a tragedy was going down over in Mississippi at the Bikes, Blues and Bayous ride near Greenwood, MS. This is a fairly well-organized charity type ride that's been going on for a few years. Early in the ride the front group came to an intersection with a state highway. As I understand it, there was a state trooper stationed there to control things since probably a thousand riders would be crossing that four-lane highway. For some reason the rider who I assume was leading the first group, Jim O'Daniel, entered the intersection and was hit by a truck and killed. Maybe he thought the state trooper had stopped traffic, or maybe he just didn't see the truck. I don't know. When I heard about it after the ride I thought the name sounded familiar. Jim rides a lot with Scott Kuppersmith, although he didn't actually do much, if any, road racing. Still, he was obviously a very experienced rider, having logged nearly 10,000 miles already this year.  Back in the spring he had been the third finisher of the Red Bluff century ride, finishing a good 20 minutes ahead of me and having done most of the ride with Patton and Jack who race a lot and have a combined age younger than some of my underwear. So I'm still trying to come to terms with how this sort of thing could have happened on a clear day, on a clear road, with a police car, on a fun ride. So sad.

The Giro Ride heads back toward town on Chef Menteur Highway

Sunday morning, with my legs surprisingly less sore than I'd expected, I headed out to do the Giro Ride. That ride was fairly routine and for the most part I kept myself safely in the draft toward the back. I could still feel the congestion in my lungs and I figured after the prior day's ride I should probably take it easy. On the way back a rider unexpectedly crashed all by himself on Bullard. I think he caught one of the seams or cracks in the road there. He seemed OK, though and rode back with us, but I swear we've had a ton of crashes and flats along that stretch since the City closed off the service road because they were too lazy to deal with the illegal dumping going on there.

Upper-Left Corner

A week ago today we took a little trip over to the upper-left corner of the contiguous U.S. for a brief visit with Danielle and Shannon.

After some internal debate, I'd decided to take the old steel Cervelo with me, and after some more internal debate decided to just put it in a 40-year-old un-padded bike bag. Risky, of course, but easy to carry around. Considering that we'd have to get from the terminal to a shuttle to a rental car, and then drive down from Seattle to Olympia (actually Lacey but close enough), the prospect of lugging the big hard-sided case I had available seemed like more trouble than it would be worth. At best, I'd get in three rides. More likely just two. So I wrapped the bike up in pipe insulation, braced the dropout ends, and put in into the bag with some cardboard at the bottom and on the sides, and hoped for the best. The Cervelo was a great racing bike in its day, and I rode it nearly to death. All of the return springs in the shifters are broken and there's some serious rust in places, so if it met its demise at the hands of Southwest Airlines it wouldn't constitute a huge disaster. As it turned out, not only did it survive the trip with nothing more than a new scratch on the downtube (my fault for not being careful packing it for the return trip) and a slightly out of true rear wheel, but Southwest didn't charge me anything extra either way, which kind of made up for some of the cost of the SUV we rented but didn't use except to go to and from the airport.

No, it's not Disneyworld

Anyway, it was kind of a long travel day because we had a plane change in Denver, but we eventually made it to SEA and headed down to baggage claim. Since I had been under the illusion that an airport in the PNW would naturally be a model of urban efficiency, I was surprised when we had to wait about half an hour before the luggage started appearing on the carousel. Finally, with bags and bike in hand we followed the signs to the rental car shuttle where we shocked to find a line of Disneyworld at Christmas time proportions. WTF?  As we soon discovered, people in Seattle could take driving lessons from people in New Orleans and be no worse for the experience. On one of the access roads to the airport some kind of shuttle bus had been hit and knocked on its side, and the police had shut down some streets for the duration, exacerbating an already clogged transit system. In Google Maps parlance, everything was red.  Dark red.  Eventually we pushed our way onto a fully packed shuttle bus and made it to the Enterprise car rental desk where everything was thankfully running with military precision.

We were in the car and out of the garage in no time, only to plunge ourselves into two hours of Interstate 5 gridlock. Google Maps was showing something like 13 incidents between Seattle and Olympia, which extended what was normally be a one-hour drive into over two hours of stop-and-go. That evening I put the bike together. Then I put Danielle's bike together since it was still in its bike box since she had moved back there. In her defense, she had recently moved, unloaded two U-Haul moving pods, started her second or third week at her new job as an epidemiologist at the Office of Public Health, had ankle surgery and was clunking around in a big boot. On the plus side, the weather for the next few days was looking great.

The next morning, Friday, I headed out for a nice 40-mile ride that I'd mapped out after consultation with Strava. I was keeping it simple and using a lot of the bike trail system and not going where I really wanted to go, which would have been to the west rather than the south, but then this was vacation and not training camp.

The ride was nice and soon after I got back we drove back up to STL to pick Shannon up from the airport on her way back from a work trip to Japan. We were going to take a look at the Glass Museum and maybe meet up with Charlotte, who lives there now, pick up lunch before heading back, but when we looked at Google Maps after the visit to the museum it looked like a repeat of the prior day, so we decided to wander around a bit, have lunch, and hang out at the biggest REI store I've ever seen until the projected return drive time dropped below the two-hour mark. By the end of the day I could feel the start of a post-nasal drip and sore throat and knew I'd caught something in the airplane. The only question was how long I'd have before it went from a scratchy throat to the plague.

Saturday morning Ben and Charlotte came down from Seattle for a ride. We did the same 40-mile course - this time a bit faster since Ben was on the front most of the time. That evening we strapped a kayak to Danielle's car and put two paddleboards into Shannon's antique pickup and headed down to Lake St. Clair to float around for a while. The weather was pleasant, the leaking paddleboard didn't deflate too much, and the virus continued its slow trip down my throat. By Saturday night I knew I was in for a chest cold and so we raided Danielle's medicine cabinet. I settled on a box of NyQuil.

Ben and Charlotte

For Sunday, Danielle had arranged for a boat ride with some friends who have a big boat. Unfortunately, I was in no shape for that by morning and basically spent the next twenty hours or so in bed. That night I packed the bike back up and we headed back to STL in the morning, arriving back in New Orleans around 10:30 pm. By then I was actually feeling considerably better, although even now there's a lingering but only occasional cough. Could've been worse, I guess. Fortunately, I'd taken Monday off from work, so although there was still a little stuff to take of online I had an extra day to recover. I pretty much overslept every morning since then, but have still gotten in some miles each day, so I should be back to normal, whatever that is, but the weekend.

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.