A Bug’s Vengeance
The only casualty of the fall.
Kevin and I were crossing Idaho on US 20 when I caught a big, juicy bug on my visor directly in front of my right eye. It left me effectively blind in that eye so I pulled over to clean it off.
I got off the bike and set it on the side stand, pulled out my cleaner stuff and sprayed the splotch of bug guts. While I was doing this Kevin pulled in behind me and got off his bike. Apparently he didn’t notice the bit of slope we were on, and as he released his grip on the bike it started to topple away from him. At the same time, it rolled forward just enough to nudge my bike and push it forward off the side stand. His bike crashed to the right and mine went down to the left.
I will forever regret that I didn’t have the presence of mind to pull out my camera and get a shot immediately of these two bikes on the ground and Kevin standing there with a dumbfounded look on his face wondering what the heck just happened. But I was too busy wondering what the heck just happened, and then we both jumped to get them both upright again.
My top bag was open so I could get the cleaning spray out, so all its contents were now scattered on the ground. The spot where I had sprayed my visor now had a patch of dirt and sand where the cleaner had picked it up as the helmet hit the ground. I had some clean-up to do. Yeah, that bug made me pay for snuffing its life.
The only damage was the left turn signal (in the picture above), which was busted. I’d call that a design flaw in the V-Strom. If the bike falls over one or the other of those is almost guaranteed to break. Kevin, who used to rent V-Stroms out of Gunnison, said it’s a $90 part and his customers were forever breaking them.
So he replaced them on all his bikes with a flush-mount set of signals that he said cost $15. His didn’t break. And he’s pretty sure he still has at least one of them that he took off one of his bikes, so replacement should be easy.
Just another day on the bike.
Biker Quote for Today
90% of my paycheck goes towards dirt bikes (the rest is just wasted).
Tags: falling motorcycles
