Is it still a "coincidence" at the third occurence, or does it become factual?
I swear, I really can't have anything too nice and/or red, cause sooner or later, I just end up throwing it down the road (so to speak).
I'm about to hit 40k miles on the R1, which should be by the end of this week, which is something I'm pretty stoked about. I bought the bike to replace my beloved Aprilia Mille about three years ago when it had 14k miles, so to date, with all the bikes I've ever owned, the R1 is the bike that I've racked the most miles on in the six years I've been riding. Actually, it's the only bike to date I've owned the longest out of all. So much for a "rebound" bike.
About a year ago is also when it became the TAAF bike. So how do I celebrate its annual anniversary and subsequently being at the cusp of 40k miles?
I get it all scratched up!
(sigh)
Let's rewind back to 48 hours ago, when I decided to finally cross off Skaggs on my list of roads to ride with a few friends of mine. Skaggs has always been one of the roads in the State that gets a lot of praise for being a great riding road, but in all the years I've been riding, I've never made it up there, even though it's only about 90 miles north of me. I've ridden to roads further than that from me.
Before heading up there, I looked at Google Maps to get an idea of how to get to Skaggs. Pretty simple; head up to Healdsburg, CA and exit off of Dry Creek Road. Head northwest on Dry Creek Road, and it turns into Skaggs Springs Road.
Not quite.
While on Google Maps it looks like the two roads eventually turn into one another, in reality, it doesn't. Heading west from Dry Creek Road, you'd have to make a left turn to get to Skaggs; Dry Creek Road continues past Skaggs and becomes another road instead. If I had actually ZOOMED into the satellite view in Google Maps, I would've notice this, but I didn't.
So three other friends and I, with myself in the front, found our way to Dry Creek Road, and stayed on there waiting for Skaggs to appear, either a sign, or the road to simply start winding up. Well the road did, and it was FUN. I'm riding the road thinking, "This has to be Skaggs. It is too fun, clear, and virtually isolated from traffic that this MUST be Skaggs."
The road just kept winding; "Skaggs" kept on going and it was just stupid fun the whole way through.
Until of course, we turned into an otherwise harmless bend on the road, as pictured below:
Have a closer look at that photo, and see that where the arrow is pointing, is the part where the fantastic two-way pavement ABRUPTLY turned into a one-lane dirt road.
That's right. In the middle of that turn, the pavement literally disappeared. There were no transitions, and if there was ample warning prior to us bearing down on that bend, I missed it (and per account of the rest following me, they saw no sign either). Even worse, it's not as if the road straightened out after it turned into a dirt road, giving us much needed room to slow ourselves down with our rear brakes; the road bent left, and to make matters worse, the left side (bottom half of the photo above) was a sheer cliff. And if that's not bad enough, there was a heavy-duty steel gate across the dirt road blocking my trajectory.
Clearly I didn't fall of the cliff, or hit the steel gate, else I wouldn't be writing this now, nor would the damage to the bike be as minimal as pictured above. I managed to scrub off as much speed as I could through the dirt with the rear brake, though admittedly not enough that I did end up riding up the hillside slope a bit instead of hitting the steel gate. This worked to my benefit a bit as it more or less scrubbed off the remaining momentum the bike and I had, but being nearly 45 degrees up in the front meant I lost my footing, and therefore the bike and I fell on the right side on a bed of rocks.
The bed of rocks were bitter-sweet; on one hand they saved the bike from even more damage, cause if the bike and I hit the ground instead, hard parts would've been broken and the fairings would've been cracked or punched or anything other than scratched. On the other hand, they weren't without their punishment, cause they did gouge my fairings. Take the good with the bad though, right?
Two of the three friends following me also got sucked into the dirt, though they had more warning than I did after seeing me in a cloud of dust, so while they still had their own dirt excursions, they managed to scrub off more speed while they still had pavement, and therefore kept it upright through the dirt. Once we got my bike upright again, I just turned to my friends Lili and Jeanette and asked, "What happened to the road?"
Lili and Jeanette had done Skaggs before, especially Jeanette. However, they were both equally sucked into the-road-that-was-not-Skaggs and how fun it was, that I'm sure they just wanted to see where it would go until stopped. You couldn't blame them if you were riding the same road.
Nobody can be faulted for this at all in my opinion, just chalk it up one of those strange things about riding. Given the circumstances and options at the time of the incident, I can't be mad as well, cause as far as damage limitation is concerned, I think I definitely pulled off the lesser of the would-be evils; the only way I could've done it better is if I was able to keep the bike upright at 45 degrees up that hillside slope. Maybe I should practice that some more...
Oh, and you want to know what the actual name of the-road-that-was-not-Skaggs is?
Rockpile Road.
See. When even fate has a sense of humor about things, you just can't be mad. :)
