It’s what we do

This entry is part 1 of 19 in the series Adventure Rider Issue #33

There’s a real temptation to label some incidents as brought about by ‘rookie mistakes’, or to call them ‘traps for young players’.

I’ve been riding a long time now, and I couldn’t be called young. Yet I’ve made a couple of howler errors lately that would make even newbies shake their heads and wonder if I know anything about riding.

First I was riding back from Queensland and it was stormy. The rain was belting down. Lightning was going crazy and I couldn’t hear the bike over the continual rolling thunder. I rode along chuckling to myself and thinking “Heading home down my local mountain road, again in the rain, I decked the bike on a slippery turn. Believe it or not, the car right behind me was a police paddy wagon.”

how lucky I was to be in a top-quality Goretex suit, good waterproof boots and an excellent helmet. I even had the right tyres on.

I finished the ride in relative comfort, parked the bike, then discovered I’d left one of the pocket flaps of the jacket open. Being Goretex, it had acted like a small, textile bucket and was full to the brim with water. In that water floated my wallet.

My plastic cards and you-beaut plastic $5.00 note were fine, of course. But all my receipts for the trip had disintegrated and were floating around like dunny paper in a septic tank.

So that was a bit of bugger, and it was payback for my smugness during the ride, I guessed.

The next one was a little more serious, but just as dumb.

A few days after that wet ride I pulled on that same suit to mount up and chase a story.

After an absolutely magic day of blasting around with some fabulous people I was heading home down my local mountain road, again in the rain, when I decked the bike on a slippery turn. Believe it or not, the car right behind me was a police paddy wagon.

As I sit here writing this I have very limited movement in my right arm because it feels like someone’s panel beaten my shoulder with a ball-pane hammer. I’m not walking all that well either, and my right hip is showing every indication of bursting into a rainbow of colour over the next couple of days.

That’s a bad enough mistake to make, but I honestly don’t feel any real shame about it. I was going slow, I knew the road well, and I firmly believe there was something on the road surface. Oil? Moss? Who knows?

No. I discovered the serious mistake when I went to put the riding gear in the wash. As always, I went to remove the armour. But there wasn’t any. The armour was still where I’d left it when that same gear had been through the wash a few days before.

Suddenly the severity of injuries became a lot easier to understand.

I hope I never stop learning, but I hope the lessons don’t come as hard as this one too often.

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