My favorite part of the flight to Oz is the sunrise while over the Pacific Ocean.But a few days ago Jonnene came across a fare sale with American Airlines that offered a one-way between the two cities for $84. After adding the fees it would be $96. This was more than half the regular price! Add in the fees for two bags of luggage ($50 total) and flying over was only $40 more than renting a car plus the cost to fill up the gas tank before turning the car in...not bad! We could consider the $40 to be a "convenience" fee for the flight. The advantage is that we can wait a couple more hours before having to leave the house, giving us more time to pack or run last minute errands or just relax a bit. And we still save around $200 for the trip to DFW.
Of course, we still have to get from Dallas to Shreveport when we come back. The fare sale expires mid-December so we can't use it for the return. We're going to wait a while to see if any other sales pop up and, if not, we'll go to Plan A and rent a car to drive back. We'll still save money and should be back home by early evening of the day we fly back into the States.
It's no secret that we're both ready to go!
Last Saturday I participated in the Louisana/Mississippi road race championships (bicycles) down in Natchez, MS. We drove down that morning since my race didn't start until 2:10 pm...didn't need to get a hotel. Saturday is when the age group races take place and I have found myself in the position of qualifying for the Masters 55-59 age group. We were going to be paired with the 60+ racers so this more than makes this an "old man" race. Attendance for these races was low this year for some reason and we only had six guys in the 55+ and three in the 60+, making only nine total racers to cover the 36 miles of a 7-lap race in Natchez State Park. There should have been twice as many but it wasn't happening this year. Don't know where everybody else was.
The weather conditions couldn't have been much better...wasn't too hot, wind wasn't bad. All I was worried about was being able to keep up on this course. Within 100 meters after you start you have to make a climb up to the top of the levee, make a sharp negative turn to the right, cross the 400-meter-long levee and soon climb three short but very steep hills. These hills always get me and I've never been able to stay with the pack more than two laps. With a small field I wasn't sure if I'd have enough people to hang with before the group might break up.
We found a great shady spot to park, next to my teammates Joe and Brian. After I got dressed in my cycling duds we went out to warm up, discuss some tactics, and talk to some of the other racers we knew. Jonnene and I worked out how I wanted to take the bottle handups and by the race start time we seemed to have everything worked out. I choose to use a set of aero wheels mainly to see if they'd do me any good on this course and, also, just for the heck of it! The front was a Zipp 404 and the back was a Blackwell 100mm deep carbon wheel, both tubulars with fairly good tires on them.
The start of our race. I'm in the middle of this photo as we begin the climb up to the top of the levee. The race began faster than I thought it would, not anything I couldn't handle...yet...but still quick considering the small group we had. Some of the guys thought we'd just stay together before making attacks later in the race but, no, there were attacks from the beginning and I was trying to keep up until my legs were warmed up enough. The pack crawled up the hills in the first lap and I was happy to see that I was staying with them but it was still a hard series of climbs, just as I remembered them. I had some trouble keeping up on the fast downhill curves, leaning the bike while going 30+ mph (I'm not a big fan of doing that) and, as a result, I let a 200-meter gap open up between me and the rest of the pack ahead. Then a fast downhill right turn, with a bump, onto Wikcliff Road and I used the next two hills with their descents to bridge back up to the pack which wasn't as hard as I thought it'd be. The course is a 5.2 mile loop and at this point we had three miles to go before starting the next lap of seven total.
It was fast, around 28-29 mph through all these beautiful trees that line the road but which also has plenty of light and dark as you go through the spotty shade. Suddenly you can see well in the light and just as suddenly it goes dark as your eyes try to adjust to the shade from the trees. Then you pop out into the sun and go through the rear entrance of the park over some rougher road. I went past Jonnene in the feed zone, happy to still be in the pack. We were still all together starting our second lap. The second lap went roughly the same as the first but the hills were getting harder to climb. I got gapped again on the descents but not as badly and easily made it back up to the group before we topped the first hill on Wikcliff. I was getting hopeful that I might be hanging in longer than I thought I would. A couple of the guys were riding kinda stupidly and I got cut off twice but there was no contact. I kept an eye on them real close after that.
I took a new cold water bottle from Jonnene as we began the third lap. We climbed up the levee again, went across, and did the series of hills again. It was getting harder but I was staying with the group and I getting my confidence up that I might make a difference in this race. After the hills I moved up to the front so that I could control the pack as we went through the curves...at my speed. It worked well but I decided to go to the back since I had minimized the gap threat on this lap. At this point we dropped a Tiger Cycling rider so there was just 8 of us now. Joe and Brian were up at the front, marking Randy, a very good racer from New Orleans. Then I felt it...a slight whump-whump-whump from the back of the bike. I had a flat! I couldn't believe it! Being in the back I couldn't tell Joe and Brian what was happening but I pulled over, shifted the gears so I could remove the rear wheel as the follow truck came up. I got my spare wheel out of the back of the truck and quickly changed them out. The driver put his hand on my backsides and pushed me down the road. It was a really quick change....that rarely happens. So I picked it up and thought maybe the pack will slow down for a lap and I could catch on. That wasn't going to happen. When I got to the start/finish line I looked up at the top of the levee and I couldn't see the pack at all. That killed my incentive to chase so I backed off, told Jonnene that I'd flatted but I was going on anyway (you never know what's going to happen up front). She wished me good luck as I went by.
After climbing the hills again, I waited for the Tiger Cycling rider to catch up to me so I'd have some company on the road and we stayed together the rest of the time. We also caught a rider from the 45+ age group that had started five minutes ahead of us so we all rode together...except for one time when the 45-pluser try to get away. We didn't chase him since he wasn't in our race but we ended up catching him anyway. He had to do two more laps than we did so there was no point in him attacking us. At the end of the last lap we made a half-hearted sprint for the line which I "won" so I finished officially fifth out of six in my age group. Brian got second in the 55+ part of the race and Joe was third in the 60+.
On the last lap: I'm in the back with the other guy in my race and the 45+ racer as we start to go across the levee. I'm ready for the race to be over by this point.We packed up quickly and headed out. Our original intention was to drive up to Monroe to see the ULM-Grambling football game but it was so late that the game would have been half over by the time we got there. So we ate at a restaurant with Joe and Brian in Winnsboro which had an all-you-can-eat seafood buffet...sweet! Then it was on to Shreveport where I listened to the game on the radio while Jonnene read her Kindle. BTW, the Warhawks won 35-7!
My Warhawks got their running game going against the Tigers of Grambling.
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