Crash/2006

A warm September Saturday afternoon and I was mid-project and needed to make yet another trip to the hardware store for some critical gizmo. I broke the rules (my rules) and took off on my bike without putting on a riding jacket. You know the drill...short ride, hot weather...

The exact sequence of events is unclear and disputed but the outcome was that I collided with the rear end of a car that had stopped short in front of me. I summersaulted over the bike and the car and ended up (briefly) unconscious in the middle of the road. I was later to find out that my bike had ended up upside down (balanced on the seat and handlebars) at the side of the road. The picture at the left doesn't do justice to the damage.

The bike was totaled. I had only minor injuries including some modest road rash, a broken finger and two badly jammed shoulders. I was taken to the hospital by ambulance and released several hours later after extensive xrays and a lot of tsk-ing.

In Massachusetts (as in many states) if you hit someone from behind, you are automatically at fault. My side of the story is that I was following this car at a safe distance and traveling within the speed limit when I noticed it was slowing. I glanced over my right shoulder to see if I could safely pass on the right. When I looked back the car was dead stopped in front of me. Collision inevitable. When I later talked to the police who attended the scene they suggested that the car that I hit was shopping yard sales and had stopped when it spotted one on the left side of the road we were traveling along. I suspect that his sighting of the yard sale was last minute and he stopped rather quickly...I don't know if he had turn signals on or not. It hardly matters except that my insurance premiums jumped significantly because I was technically at fault.

The fallout from the event was that my shoulders and neck were junk for the better part of a year. I had a hard time looking over my shoulder and when I did, it was painful. I was also afraid of traveling in either car or on a bike. Since I didn't have a bike at the moment, that was no problem. The fear of riding in a car took months to abate.

About month after the accident I decided it was time to get another bike and located a good used bike in Florida. I had my son Jason check it out (it was close to where he lived). I haggled with the seller and ultimately hopped a plane to Florida for a short visit with my family and to pick up the bike.

Riding an unfamiliar bike 2000+miles so soon after the crash might not have been a good idea, but it seemed okay to me at the time. All that "get back on the horse after you've been thrown" bullshit seemed compelling to me then. My body was quite sore from the accident and I was eating ibuprofin for the entire trip. There was some bad weather along the way, but essentially the trip was uneventful and I got back to Cape Cod none the worse for wear.

I rode relatively little that fall and winter. I spent time tweaking the bike with a new seat and a better windscreen. Come spring I rode some more, but every time on the bike I had to deal with my lack of confidence...even fear about being on the bike. I rode very, very cautiously and was more hyper-vigilant than usual about all kinds of road hazards. Slowly, slowly the confidence returned and the fear abated. I think it's safe to say that even though I've put on about 20,000 miles since the accident, it is never forgotten completely. At this point (almost three years later) I feel that I'm a better rider because of the accident. It's an awful way to get to be a better rider, but the reality of motorcycling is that there are a lot of ways to get into trouble on a bike. The more you really, really understand that, the safer you are likely to be.

All of this is prelude to my next series of posts which chronicle my 6,992 mile trip during the summer of 2007. Stay tuned.

Musings on Motorcyling

I started long distance motorcycle touring about 13 years ago. I was not a youngster, and I'm less of a youngster now. Neither the motivation for buying that (used) R100RT, nor for the first 4,000+ mile trip I took on it about three months after buying has ever been clear to me. I'm sure the bike represented a kind of freedom and a response to being in my 50's...middle-aged angst and all that. The trip was a kind of challenge to myself, maybe a test to see if I could do a long solo ride. And since I had to go to Santa Fe for a meeting anyway, there was some sort of logical/rational aspect to the ride.

In hindsight it was a somewhat foolhardy thing to do. I'd owned the bike only a few months. My riding skills were scanty...I was a careful rider, but had very little experience on this bike. The trip would provide quite a lot of that experience and it would also infect me permanently with an itch for more long rides. Out of foolish beginnings can come great passions I guess.

In outline the trip took me from Massachusetts to Santa Fe using almost only "blue highways." I went west to Pennsylvania and then s/w across mid-Atlantic states...through Arkansas, a piece of Oklahoma, and across the Texas panhandle, New Mexico...and into Santa Fe...about 2,700 miles.

A lot of the details of the trip have faded, but some aspects are still clear...
-the actual departure (leaving, cutting loose, accepting the unknown)
-settling into the bike and the fact that everything you need for the duration (you hope) is somewhere on or in the bike.
-recognizing that after the first day of the trip every mile created a new personal record for miles ridden
-the first torrential downpour near Lancaster, PA. I pulled under an underpass to get my rain gear on and got totally drenched by the water thrown up by passing cars and trucks...nothing quite cements your sense of solo riding like bad weather.
-the feeling of tremendous movement/change and a complete absorption in the moment's landscape and the road under your tires. There is really nothing except what is within your view that matters (and it matters very much because you have to attend to it closely to stay safe)..
-the endless sameness to the landscape in west Texas...miles and miles of flat/fence/cows/grassland...the King Ranch.
-arriving at my destination in Santa Fe and finding my colleagues and being rather taken aback at their amazement at the trip I had just undertaken.
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Then it was on the Washington, DC to meet my wife for a short vacation in the nation's capital. About another 2000 miles of mostly back roads and then three or four days of museums and good restaurants.
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And then only another 400 miles or so back home.
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The residue? My first long solo trip took me around 5000 miles 3/4 of the way across the country and back. I had a wonderful time. I was hooked. All I could think about was what a blast it was to travel this way. It was so different from car (cage) travel. Within a few months I was planning more trips........and some of those trips (or snippets of them) will be the subjects of future posts.

Wintertime

It's been a very long and rather harder than usual winter here on Cape Cod. This area of Massachusetts has already had about 50" of snow (as compared to about 19" on average) so far this winter. Here on the Cape a lot of this has been in the form of snow/rain/sleet...and repeated cycles of freezing and thawing have created enormous ice sheets that make walking dangerous...never mind riding. Winter in the northeast is never wonderful motorcycle time. There are a lot of days simply colder than I want to put up with and freezing temps and precip make things even dicier. So what does one do? (Photo to left shows new bike hibernating unhappily in the garage.)

Well, for my part, some of the down time is spent planning trips for the better weather months coming up. And since my bike is new to me ... bought it used last August ... it's not quite set up exactly the way I would like it to be. So tweaking various parts of the bike and buying and installing some things helps to make the dark months go by a little faster. This latter activity is called "farkling" by some hard bitten moto riders. Check around a bit with sites like ADVrider.com and you will find that farkling a bike is somewhere between an obsession and sickness. It is especially prevalent during the off season. Some people prefer to manufacture their modifications (pennytech) and some simply go the mercantile route. Even if you're buying there's a ton of stuff available second hand and an amazing number of web sites that cater to that particular need.

So what changes have I spent time on this winter?

• A new windscreen was one of the first changes. The OEM screen was too minimalist for my riding style...the buffeting at highway speeds was not comfortable. A Wunderlich taller screen with greater adjustability was the fix for that.
  
• The second thing needing attention was the seat. For some reason, BMW is practically infamous for their uncomfortable seats. I purchased a Sargent seat because I'd used one on my previous bike and liked it. This one fit perfectly and so far is extraordinarily comfortable.
  
• The bike came with a pair of HID lights (Hella) but the previous owner had had them wired into the high beams. I like to have auxilliary lights on a separate switch...so another change had to be made.
  
• I also needed my GPS adapted for the new bike. This required a new mounting system and wiring the unit's power cord into the bike's battery.
  
• The bike also came with slightly knobby tires...I go on dirt roads, but don't plan on really gnarly off-road stuff, so road tires were a better idea.
• I have a Touratech tank bag that fit my previous bike that has served me very well. It didn't fit the shape of the new bike's gas tank. After some studying I devised a way to alter the shape of the base of the system. It now fits perfectly...no cost. This tank bag also accomodates panniers that are a wonderful way to pack items fairly low on the bike.
• The taller windscreen didn't quite fix the buffeting, so I'm trying a pair of "winglets" or wind deflectors which a number of people have suggested make a lot of difference. They're on, but not really tested yet.

And so far (Groundhog day) that's all there is for now on the farkling front. There will probably only be modest changes from here out. I've tweaked my cold weather gear a bit and bought a new pair of riding gloves...but those are minor things. I'm still considering engine/cylinder guards for the bike.

The other winter footle (look it up) I mentioned was planning trips. I'll save that for a later post.