Time again to laugh and shudder at some of the things that motorcyclists have encountered on the road. As always, I'm picking these from a thread on the Adventure Riders forum where the question was posed, "What is the strangest thing you hit/almost hit?"
- I had a bull, dragging a piece of chain run in front of me somewhere in New Brunswick. Guess he was enjoying his newfound freedom.
- Along the Eastern border of Glacier National Park I turn thru a sharp curve just outside Glacier to almost hit a doe giving birth right in the middle of the road.
- Racing my buddy's Plymouth barracuda, that car topped out about 125 seeing as how I was doing 145 and passing him he threw a newspaper out the window at me, the damn thing wrapped around my helmet like a piece of steel I could NOT pull the thing off at that speed. I was down to about 90 before I could get it off, fully blinded of course.
- In '89 a surfboard coming from the roof rack of the car in front of me- folded the mirror of my R80RT at about 85 mph. (I was starting to pass the car when the straps holding the board broke.) The fin gave me a nice jolt and a blue upper arm. The board then stuck in the radiator of the car following me. Didn't go down on that one.
And from this same rider:
- A Goldfish--You might wonder how this can happen since the natural habitats of bikers and goldfish are quite different. I must admit that it was me who was leaving the inherited habitat of the biker and transgressed into the habitat of the goldfish. But in my defense I must state that I was rather forcefully thrown from my intended path by the hydraulic oil in the bend. I left the road in a tangent, entered the garden of a house through the hedge and zoomed right through a group of people that were on the lawn and entered the domain of the goldfish in their pond. The nice folks there helped me get my bike out of the pond, briefly lamented the casualty (goldfish) and invited me to the barbecue they were having. (And the owner of the house who is also a rider offered me to use his tools to get the bike running again.)
- A live deer sitting in the road. I'd been riding for a total of about a week. My first trip to work on the bike, O dark thirty on a two lane road. The deer had been hit by a car but was still alive and just sitting upright in the lane looking around. Missed it by about six inches.
- Last August I was riding my SV650 on a windy day. A cardboard box blew from right to left to in front of my tire, I'm going about 30mph. I brake and the front tire goes in a pothole where the box had been. And just that quick, the front tire stopped and the rest of the bike with me on it did the full flip-over stoppie. Bike landed on me and was almost undamaged. I had a broken collarbone.
- Twice a bee hit my cheek like a rock inside my fullface helmet then made its way into my jacket and starts stinging me at highway speed. Imagine how fast I got my gear off. My friend thought I was having a seizure at first then he couldn't stop laughing. I didn't share his humor but could appreciate it.
And then, to bring home the point that funny as some of these are, they're also serious, we have this final one:
- A dead motorcycle rider. He was riding in the oncoming traffic and crossed the double yellow. He V-ed the front end of the car directly in front of me and went up and over coming right at me. I swerved and ducked and he just missed me.
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