A Little Detour

This morning's ride into work was a little different. I had to make a little routing change. Last Thursday, the Quad City Times ran a story about how Davenport handled the flooding on the Mississippi River. The height of the river at Lock & Dam 15 (where I cross the river via the Government Bridge) topped out at 16.5 feet. To sum the article up, "Flooding? What Flooding? 16.5 feet? Hah! That wasn't anything, we handled that so easily. Bring it". Well... Thursday night / Friday morning there was a little bit of rain up north... about 4" in a few places. So... the 16.5' easily handled flood is now forecast to be a 19.5' flood, cresting this coming Wednesday. (See http://www.qctimes.com/special/river_levels/) Coming into downtown Davenport Saturday around 2:00pm at the end of a lovely ride, Davenport was busy sand bagging, building several earthen walls in downtown, and building a big wall around the water company. I ride by the water company normally on the River Front Bike Path, so it was going to be un-ridable.

There is a user pointable web cam right by the sky bridge that can be found here -


http://webcam46.ci.davenport.ia.us/top/liveapplet.html


So... It was down the Duck Creek Bike Path this morning to Farnam and then two blocks east to Iowa to get down to the Government Bridge. That was a bit different, but not too bad. The worst was the 37F and rain this morning. The rail bridge that goes onto Arsenal Island had a bunch of water under it, but it was still rideable without getting into the river. It won't be in another foot of river, so I'll have to work something out for that.



More on Saturday's ride: That was the annual QCBC Tailwind Century. So... we hopped on a pair of school buses and got dropped off in South English Iowa. Basically, it is 100 miles west of the Quad Cities. It was a good one. The wind was out of the west at 20mph, with gusts to 40mph. I was back at Scott County Community College with 98 miles in about 4:40. It was nice to remember how it was being able to ride big gears for miles and miles at speed. Made me feel like I was fit again. The wall clock time for me was about 5:20. Made two stops, once in Riverside Iowa (future birth place of Captain James T. Kirk) where I had a Gatorade and a doughnut. The other stop was in Buffalo, where I had a Coke and an energy gel. I decided to blow lunch off since I was certain that it wouldn't be something that I'd like to eat on the road (read fried "stuff"). Coming in, I think I found the World's Longest Rubble Strip, aka Rockingham Road. There were holes that had holes! It was a pretty hairy dodging them.