If You Ride Long Enough!

They say if you ride long enough on two wheels you will some day hit the dirt wrong side out, or something like that. In other words you're going to loose it and dump the bike. If you're lucky you will be the only one involved and luckier still you might just be able to get up and walk away from it.
Like a lot of folks I've talked to the last few years I started riding again after about thirty years or so. About the time I was looking at age 55 coming up in just a couple of months. It was all pretty innocent really. One of the guys at church one day said some of us should get motorcycles and start a riding club. Several people we knew had bikes and was members of some club or other. Here I was with no real hobbies and not much else to spend my time on other than work. All the boys had moved out and started families of their own. So why not. Come to find out after a few weeks guess who was the only one that went out and bought them a motorcycle?

2007 Stratoliner 1900

I bought my first motorcycle, a Honda 350, some time around 1973. It was a used bike but ran great and I really enjoyed riding it. I lived in Bryan Texas at the time and I put a lot of miles on that bike around the central Texas area. I had several friends that rode as well but my brother had a Honda 750. That was the bike to have at the time. He let me ride it a few times and that motorcycle had some get up and go.
When you're young and not so smart you sometimes make wrong decisions. Like deciding to take a night ride after you just spent the last three hours or so in a nightclub. Some of the guys wanted to take a ride, so for some reason I chose to go along with them. I lived on the west side of town and had to go by the house to pickup something. I have no idea what that was but it was sure the wrong thing to do.

On my trip from the house to meet up with everyone else I took a road that would eventually dead end, turn right and them make an immediate left over some railroad tracks and continue on. When you ride this road at night with the street lights helping to line the way for you it's a little surprising how it makes the road seem to just continue on straight ahead.

Now I remember thinking "this road comes to an end somewhere about ......oops!"

I hit the side of the ditch head-on, flipped over and sideways in the air and landed going backwards on my side, still on the bike in the rock and gravel that goes along with a set of railroad tracks. When I separated from the motorcycle it ended up laying between the rails of the tracks. Fortunately I was wearing my helmet which had a bubble sheild on it. When I hit the ditch my helmet hit the handle bar and split the sheild and bent the bars down and forward. When I hit the gravel on my right side it tore a hole in my leg muscle that I still have today.

I was very lucky on that day. I was able to pick the bike up and move it off the railroad tracks. I then proceeded to walk about two miles to a friends house for some help. They took me to the emergency room where they doctored up my nose and let me go. I spent the next ten days or so hobbling around and letting all the road rash heal up.

1971 Honda 350

This is not the bike but it'll give you some idea what it would look like.