Flea The Race

Day	12	Date	20th May 2015
Distance Total Distance	19.0km 596.7km	Weather	Misty
Rolling Time Total Rolling	01:15:03 34:30:46	Terrain	Flat
Climbing Total Climbing	118m 4,919m	Spend	Motel $75 Pizza $18
Average Speed	15.2k/h	Sleeping	Motel
Max Speed	48.2k/h	Difficulty	Easy but tough!

This morning got off to a misty start, I was on the road for 8:30am hoping to get out another 100km to make up for the slow progress over the last week, three km into the ride I spy a spare bunny cord on the hard shoulder that some other passer by had lost along the way.  I had 4 but threw 2 away as the end hooks pulled off so I wanted another.  I picked it up and slung it over my handle bar before continuing onwards.  A wee while later I copped it starting to slip off the handle bars towards the front wheel so I hit the front break to slow down incase it got caught up in the wheel, a mess I didn’t want to deal with but I got dealt a better mess for pulling the front break too hard in the misty wet conditions.

 

My front wheel slipped as I pulled the breaks and as soon as it did that it went sideways from under me, I didn’t even have a second to correct the fall and get out of it, nope, it was gone and there was no stopping it until friction, body parts, bike bits and road surface all had their go at slowing us down.  I think I was doing about 40km/h at the time so stopping took a while, I finally came to a halt in a grassy verge at the side of the road off the hard shoulder and lay there for 5 minutes quite confused at what the hell had just happened.  I hit my head off the road and scraped all my left side leg, arm, waist and hand.  All my pointy edges the road tried to erode away, now I know that having no helmet was a mistake and I did buy one for the trip but mistakenly left it behind in the hostel in Victoria and only realised at the ferry terminal when some passer buy asked me if I had one.  I decided to continue on without one, I mean, I was hardly going to fall off my bike, thats just silly talk!

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The 5 minutes of confusion faded into the background of the pain I felt from my cuts and scrapes, my hand was numb, my head was throbbing and all of my left side was searing with pain, I sat up and remained there for another hour wondering what the hell I was going to do and trying to come up with a plan, really I just wanted a passer by to stop and make it all better but that didn’t happen.  I checked my phone maps and saw that the town of Astoria was 15km away so I finally hauled my ass out of the ditch got on my bike and slowly made my way over the Megler Bridge into Astoria, first stop, The Lamplighter Motel as you enter the town.  I paid for one night and if the cost was one million dollars I would still have slid my card through the machine with a smile.

I didn’t leave the motel for the day, I lay on the bed, watched TV, had my most painful shower ever and ordered take out pizza from a local pizza joint I found online.  What a shithole of a day!  Todays lesson kids is always wear your helmet on the road.

Bring on tomorrow!