This was Mardi Gras weekend, folks. Yes, five days jam-packed with shenanigans (for most people) and sleep (for me) here in New Orleans. (I can't believe I'm blogging about it on Fat Tuesday itself, but that's besides the point.) We got our respective training sessions done, but we also made sure to fit them around the Mardi Gras parade schedule. The entire city stops functioning during this holiday weekend, and you can't really get much cycling done if there are are 250,000 drunk people blocking the road. Planning your rides can go a long way this time of year.
Thursday started off with a team dinner before the parades, which was an ingenious idea. A teammate cooked up a Mexican feast and invited those of us in the area over for a quick bite to eat (and for some reason I couldn't say no). The food was very good and I even picked up some recipe ideas during the event. The guacamole was the best I've ever had, and my teammate added mango to one of her pico de gallo dishes, which left me pretty speechless. Yup, speechless, like in the romance movies. Deer caught in the headlights. Lance Armstrong doing trigonometry. It was that good, folks. I'm pretty sure I made the biggest dent in the pico/mango dish, and the team can attest to that. Hey, at least I didn't make the biggest dent in all of the dishes, right? After dinner, we stepped outside (read: across the street) and watched the Krewe of Muses parade.
Mexican food to kick off the weekend.
On Saturday, the team woke up at 5:30am to volunteer for the Warrior Dash (the race with insane obstacles) over in Norco, LA. It made sense for us to help out with a running race since so many volunteers come to our cycling races. So we entered our vehicles and got on the road by 6:00am. The weather was a bit drizzly, but we parked at the race venue, threw on some raincoats and made the best of the situation. The race organizers split us into various volunteer groups once we got there, and one of the coordinators told my group that we would get to have the "fun" job. I didn't quite believe her until she actually told us what we were doing (I thought she was being sarcastic in using the word "fun"). She basically told us that we would get to light fires on the race course all day, which is a pretty awesome job considering the fact that most of us weren't allowed to light fires when we were kids.
Groggy much?
Laugh all you want, but this guy most likely had no problem getting out of the grass parking lot after the rain storm.
Enough firepower to fend off the warriors.
The only drawback to that field was the vast number of fire ant mounds, which I didn't quite see until it was too late. I have a newfound respect for those sneaky insects. You most likely glossed over the topic of fire ants while you were in grade school, and if you're anything like me, you probably didn't pay much attention to the descriptive words such as "stinging," "painful," and "venom." But those words became vividly enhanced once I stumbled upon the ant nest. Whoops. It's more painful than it looks, but I should have been watching where I was going in the first place. Note to self: Wear eyeglasses more often in order to avoid situations like this one.
My legs after the catastrophic invasion of fire ants.
Real fire (not fire ants).
Teammate looking official.
Big random spider.
The guy in first place as he approached our burning logs.
Yes, that's Snow White, a dream come true.
The chip timing system stayed intact through all the mud and shenanigans.
Once the race was over, we all got into our respective vehicles (after a short storm warning) and drove home. The fire that we were stoking made it onto the local news website later that day, and I am quite proud of it. Not bad for a half day's work!
Fast forward to yesterday (Lundi Gras). My roommate and I walked over to the parade route and caught the Krewe of Proteus and Krewe of Orpheus parades. All in all, it was a pretty good evening with not much to complain about. We ran into some old friends who recently graduated, and after the parades some of us headed home to rest up for the actual Mardi Gras parades, which will be going on in a few hours.
Happy Mardi Gras
No comments:
Post a Comment