kpaul
The Great Destroyer
I've been riding a lot in the past week out here in WA, Saturday I took a pretty decent trip around the mountains. 250 miles, 5 hours (incl. 1 hour stop) of relatively high speed mountain riding, all without incident. Here's the track data for those interested: uTrack - online GPX track report generator
Also killed some sizeable flying creatures:
Anyways, last night I just went for a quick burger run about 15 minutes from home, had to take a new route because of some closed roads. I'm moving along when the truck in front of me turns and I hear screeching tires. I look behind me and there's a teenager very close behind me but I didn't see any smoke so I assumed it was the turning truck's tires, just low on air.
A hundred yards later, I'm between an SUV and the teenager (in a Stanza I believe) and we're descending a pretty steep hill to an intersection with a main road. I'm taking it slow, using some rear brake to keep myself balanced and then I hear the screeching again. This time I know it has to be the kid, so I let off the brake a little to swerve across the oncoming lane over to the shoulder there (the oncoming traffic was far enough away for that to be a safe maneuver). I watched the kid with his locked brakes skating down the hill, finally stopping about a foot away from the SUV that had been in front of me. He would surely have taken me out and I don't see any way I could not get run over in that situation either.
I'm not sure what his problem was, maybe he was messing with his ipod and just not paying attention. Twice is a stretch though, maybe there was something wrong with the brakes but not paying attention aligns better with his being a stupid teenager. What's certain is that he doesn't know how to unlock his brakes. He was white as a ghost (and he was Indian, so that's a dramatic change), so he was definitely shocked and didn't need a lecture I was about to go give him. I wasn't really all that upset either, didn't really register how close it was until a couple miles later.
Also killed some sizeable flying creatures:
Anyways, last night I just went for a quick burger run about 15 minutes from home, had to take a new route because of some closed roads. I'm moving along when the truck in front of me turns and I hear screeching tires. I look behind me and there's a teenager very close behind me but I didn't see any smoke so I assumed it was the turning truck's tires, just low on air.
A hundred yards later, I'm between an SUV and the teenager (in a Stanza I believe) and we're descending a pretty steep hill to an intersection with a main road. I'm taking it slow, using some rear brake to keep myself balanced and then I hear the screeching again. This time I know it has to be the kid, so I let off the brake a little to swerve across the oncoming lane over to the shoulder there (the oncoming traffic was far enough away for that to be a safe maneuver). I watched the kid with his locked brakes skating down the hill, finally stopping about a foot away from the SUV that had been in front of me. He would surely have taken me out and I don't see any way I could not get run over in that situation either.
I'm not sure what his problem was, maybe he was messing with his ipod and just not paying attention. Twice is a stretch though, maybe there was something wrong with the brakes but not paying attention aligns better with his being a stupid teenager. What's certain is that he doesn't know how to unlock his brakes. He was white as a ghost (and he was Indian, so that's a dramatic change), so he was definitely shocked and didn't need a lecture I was about to go give him. I wasn't really all that upset either, didn't really register how close it was until a couple miles later.
