Motorcycle Accident

I had a minor motorcycle accident last night. One roommate has an old 1972 Honda and we were riding it around the neighborhood. I'd been just making single laps around a couple blocks with nothing above 3rd gear since it's an old bike and it's probably been 15 years since I've done any riding. It was pretty fun to do. It's only a 100CC motor so it's not very big, but it's a fun bike to play around on. There are a couple of things about it that help you realize it's old, such as the accelerator sticking a lot and the gears can be a bit sensitive when going into second or better.

I decided to take a second lap as I came back around the driveway and made it to the bottom of the hill two blocks away before having trouble. I thought I was downshifting from 3rd to 2nd to make the turn, but it was apparently downshifting from 4th to 3rd. As I let off the clutch to come out into what I thought was second, I was braking for the turn as I'd done several times already, but the accelerator got stuck and it lurched out from under me. I slid on the left side and the front wheel slid under a parked pickup. Thankfully, it didn't touch the pickup. I skinned up the back of my left hand and felt a tremendous stinging pain on my left knee as I got up. There was a huge hole in my jeans and when I examined closer after limping up the hill to the house, I went a couple layers deep in the skin of the knee. My knee is bruised pretty good and skinned up, but I'm ok. Thankfully, it's a small bike and I was only going about 20 MPH into the slide. It could have been much worse.

The bike suffered a broken left turn signal that may be able to be superglued back on and a screw came out that my roommates found on the road. Both of them said they hadn't ran that fast in quite some time as they came running down the hill after the accident. I was surprised my smoking roommate even made it down the hill without stopping to choke out some air for a while. :) Good guys and they made sure it wasn't a serious accident.

This isn't my first motorcycle accident, but the first while being in control of the bike. When I was a kid and lived in Sedalia, MO, my dad brought our family over to Charlie Brown's house. Yes, the guy's name was Charlie Brown. We were riding blue and red Honda's around his house on slightly wet grass. On one side of the house there was a barbed wire fence laying down, but we had missed it several times going around the house. On one pass we slid on the wet grass and laid the bike down on this fence. I still have the small scars on my right arm from that one, but there were no stitches involved.

It could have been worse, but thankfully it wasn't. I'll be back on there when the knee swelling goes down soon!