I drive way too fast to worry about my cholesterol

The shortcut worked!!! But then, I was going like hell.

Thursday Night, late Thursday night. This is the furthest I've been from the drivers seat since yesterday morning. I'm in the Motel 8 just outside Albuquerque New Mexico, Ciroc Vodka and lemonade in hand. I've either been driving, sleeping in the drivers seat, fetching coffee, or pumping gas, since I left home at 6:45 Wednesday morning. 2 Time zones, 32 hours of driving, 2100 miles, yes, that's miles, not kilometers, and not a single speeding ticket. The first day I could have done in my sleep, I was tracing the same route I'd taken a dozen times to the FreeFall Convention and hardly needed to look at the map until I'd crossed into Missouri. I slept in the car that night and should be in the Bent Prop Saloon for dinner Friday night. Things were helped along greatly by the fact that once you cross the Mississippi all the states have a posted limit of 75 Miles An Hour. Add in a fudge factor, and I was simultaneously impressed by my average speed and horrified by my gas mileage. Pulling the trailer can't be helping.

Speaking of trailers, every time I put a bike on one, there's a problem. The first time I loaded a bike unsupervised I came within a hairs breadth of flipping a perfectly good BWM right off the side of the trailer upside down to the ground. My technique hasn't improved. If I don't have a problem loading a bike, I seem to compensate by nearly dropping one off when I unload it. The only time a motorcycle on a trailer is safe with me is in transit.

Until now.

And, now, for something completely different.

I checked all the tie downs before I left the house, and the very last thing I did was take a bungee cord and tie it as tight as I could around the front brake lever and handlebar, locking the front wheel. The bike has 4 tie down straps on it, pinning it to the trailer in a X shape, each corner securely fastened to the bike and trailer by ratchet straps capable of withstanding 1500 pounds of stress each. Kevin showed me how to tie a bike down to a trailer, and he insisted that one of the most important steps was to tie off the front brake. He swore up and down that in an emergency it would keep the bike from moving. I thought he was full of crap, but just in case, every time I loaded a bike I tied off the brake. All the real work was done by the bikes suspension: you just kept reefing up on the ratchets, tightening the bike down to the trailer until the springs had no more give, and the fucker wasn't going to go anywhere.

Late Wednesday afternoon, tearing along through a construction zone in Cleveland, with concrete barriers on either side of a tight, uneven asphalt surface, I hit the Mother Of All Potholes. There was a semi-trailer riding my ass, and another right beside him in the other lane. I saw the car in front of me suddenly pitch down and forwards to the left, and before I had braced to take the impact of the hole myself my eyes went up to the rear view mirror. My front left wheel dropped in first, starting a wave that went through the tongue of the trailer finally whip-cracking the back of the trailer several feet in the air. It seemed like slow motion as I watched my bike and trailer disappear upwards out of sight in the mirror, drop back down, slam into the ground, bounce back up, and reappear, with the bike on the trailer...... barely.

It was canted over at about a 30 degree angle and I watched in horror as I waited for it to fall off the trailer completely.

Just to put things in context: I had been having the best year of my life, and then I Broke My Neck. I got my life back on Tuesday, and there I am on Wednesday watching my (non-blond) Baby getting tossed under the wheels of a couple of 18 wheelers.

Both truckers must have seen what had happened on my trailer as they both suddenly backed away from me, whether out of self preservation or  an attempt to help I'll never know, but it gave me enough room to s-l-o-w-l-y apply my brakes, e-a-s-e into an exit ramp, and finally pull into a Mcdonalds parking lot. The entire time I could barely tear my eyes from the rear view mirror. Any moment I expected to see the bike topple off and disappear over the concrete barriers into the construction zone.

I walked around the trailer for a couple of minutes while I pieced together what had happened. Both rear  tie downs were unhooked. The trailer had been tossed in the air, and came down with enough force to drive the rear suspension down even further, putting enough slack in the straps to enable them to both fall off. The bike was then held on by the 2 front downs, and the front brake. If the brake hadn't been tied off, and the bike was able to roll forward......

If I'd been lucky it would have fallen onto it's side on the trailer and bounced around causing thousands of dollar damage as it bounced around. Unlucky, and I'd be shopping for a new bike.

Kevin used to be my rigger, he packed my reserve. In that capacity he never had a save, and I never owed him a bottle. I do now. That stupid bungee cord was the only thing standing between the FZ staying put or flopping off the trailer.

I straightened up the bike, reattaching the straps, and tightened them so much I half expected to see the corners of the trailer start to bend up.

I'd managed to get ahead of the weather when I left home. According to the DJ the forecast was "Fog, heavy at times, with freezing rain later in the day, followed by heavy snow, high winds," (finishing as a note of hysteria crept into his voice) "great big cracks in the earth and God knows what the Hell else!" I was caught by part of the system coming up from Mexico but apart from some rain the weather has been great for driving. I'm a little worried about today though. When I stepped outside to grab a couple things from the car I was literally blown off my feet. Tumbleweeds were blowing through the parking lot and a dozen had become entangled in the bike, car, and trailer. I can barely see 100 feet in the dust. The forecast between here and Eloy is for winds gusting to 65 miles an hour. That's the speed at which a Cessna becomes airborne! Take a Cessna 150, put it on a strong enough cable, and you could fly the thing like a kite out there today. At least I'll be going straight into it for the most part and won't have to deal with a crosswind, but the sandblasting effect will probably do as much damage as  almost suffered when the tie downs came loose.