Oops

The day dawned foggy today. Not me (well, maybe a little) but the weather out there.

My favorite sunglasses, the Columbia swept-back polarized ones, have some kind of weird smudge or scrape on one lens. Last night at Walmart I bought some safety sunglasses - the polycarbonate lenses won't scratch easily. Also bought a bandana, some socks with all-synthetic fibers for drying quickly, and a golf shirt that doesn't have stains, unlike the one I brought with me. I threw away a shirt and a pair of socks to make room for the new stuff.

I had two nights' stay left before I need to be in Houston. There weren't any outstanding destinations along the way – San Antonio did not excite – but based on a conversation I had last night with a local at the bar, I thought Seguin, and its sister city New Braunfels, might be interesting. I set out east along U.S. 90, which goes directly through San Antonio. To preserve my no-freeway rule and not go nuts plodding through the center of the city, I decided to leave 90 at Hondo and go north through the hill country, then pick up Texas 46 to Sequin, bypassing San Antonio.

Well, the weather kind of sucked. The foggy morning morphed into constant drizzle as I left Del Rio, Visibility was about a quarter-mile, so the long views of the West were history. Uvalde was an attractive town with a beautiful town square. What ever happened to town squares? A mall just isn't the same.

At Hondo I turned north on 173 and was soon cruising through the hill country, Visibility was still poor, and the rain continued, but the closer views were gorgeous. More than once I caught myself thinking, "This looks like a golf course." But no, it was just a grassy pasture studded with oaks. Even with the restricted views, this was a very pretty part of the state.

I reached Banderas and my turn onto Texas 46. The rain increased, and lightning began to flash. I swept past yuppie ranch estates and feed stores and hill country churches. Sometimes the traffic was intense, especially a stretch of highway construction next to a mall. As the pace picked up again, I followed a pickup truck who was going approximately the speed I was comfortable with. When there were passing lanes he moved over but so did I; in the pounding rain, I wasn't interested in being the leader.

Which makes what happens next harder for me to rationalize. The pickup truck crested a hill and, I presume, saw the crash scene on the other side, with emergency vehicles blocking the entire road. A bunch of vehicles had braked to an abrupt stop and so did my predecessor, but my view of the scene was blocked by the truck and I was late to sense the problem. When I did, I got on the brakes, increasingly hard, until I asked the front tire for more traction than the tire could give, and the tire said, screw it, I'm done. At which point the tire slid out and the bike "lowsided" – fell onto its left side.

I was able to deduce this as I was traveling rapidly southbound in a prone position with great views of the pavement, of the bike coming to rest behind me, of the surrounding landscape. I was rather impressed with how far I slid. I guess it's because the pavement was waterlogged. When I finally stopped, I got up expeditiously and hoofed it back toward the bike. Some of the luggage had remained where it was fastened, but the tank bag had come completely unzipped from the stress of the crash, and it's contents were all over the place. As I gathered its contents, cars passed by in the same direction. And I discovered that the camera bag had been run over.

It turns out that the Canon SX-50HS was the major casualty. Also, the left front turn signal on the bike was pretty much pulverized. And the previously pristine plastic bodywork now had a black skidmark on one corner.

OK, so the bike was on its side on the shoulder of the road. It needed to be upright, but I have enough trouble lifting an unladen bike, much less one that still had so much luggage attached to it. The power of necessity caused me to fail twice, but then lift the bike on the third try. I hit the starter a few times, but the prolonged sideways posture of the carburetors made starting it problematic. Eventually, however, it caught and ran.

I reattached some of the luggage attachment points that had separated. As I tried to mount the bike I had a searing pain in my left calf. It had been fine until now – where did that come from? The crash itself, or the lift? After I eventually awkwardly mounted I noticed that the handlebars were no longer square – they were five or ten degrees to the left.

An EMS tech from the crash scene down the hill was plodding toward me. He arrived and inquired about my condition. I told him that things were fine except for a very sore left calf. He asked me to be safe and plodded off again. I set off at a notably more conservative pace, the tweaked handlebars causing constant mental alarms.

I rode into New Braunfels, which in other circumstance would have been a nice town to sightsee. But all I could think about was getting a room, not necessarily the one I had targeted, still 16 miles away. While I was in the lobby of one motel, I checked out nearby motorcycle shops and discovered Woods Cycle Country, 2 miles away. They said they would check the damages, so off I went. After a few false turns, I found my way. The service managers were as nice as they could be, offering me tools to work on the tweaked handlebars. Charlie Henderson, the jefe of service, came out and showed me the crude but effective untweak: Get the front tire of the bike close to an obstacle (a concrete column is good), sit on the bike, and quickly lash the handlebars so that the front tire strikes the obstacle sideways.

It worked. I actually overcompensated on the first lash, so had to aim the bike the other way and give the handlebars a softer whack. Now I was back in business.

I headed back to an entry-level motel in Seguin and settled in for the night. Tomorrow I'll go look at the interesting historic and cultural features of downtown Seguin, but tonight I'm just taking anti-inflammatories and cocooning. More news tomorrow!

Looking back at the crash, I can only blame myself. I was riding in a way that would be safe in dry weather, but it was raining hard, and I did not compensate enough by lengthening my following distance. Also, as I saw myself approaching that stopped line of traffic, I thought the best answer was to increase braking, but intense braking on wet pavement has an inevitable outcome. I will certainly take these lessons to heart in the future, but it's a little humiliating to have to learn those lessons in this manner.