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I took the motorcycle out for a bit longer of a trip yesterday. Mostly I ride this bike as a commuter for my 4.3 mile trip to work. On this day I was off to the barber. My barber is actually an old friend of mine who I've known since we were in 7th grade in school, which is a lot of why I make the 40 minute trip every 6 weeks or so to hang out and get a haircut and beard trim. It helps that he's also the best at what he does of course.
The ride out was uneventful, but it marked my first time taking the highway for a significant stretch and served as a sort of test run for longer trips. At 70mph this bike feels rock solid, right at home and I'm sure it (and I) could do a nice long day at this pace if needed. If anything the bike is even more eager than me to go fast, and at this speed it's just past halfway to it's full capability, a speed which I have no desire to experience any time soon. But it made for a successful test and encourages me that we'll be doing some inter-state travel in the future.
Being a beautiful, sunny day I saw no reason to go straight home from there and instead just got off on some country roads to explore. It's definitely fun to head out on some twisty's every now and then, although my own skills are still at the novice level and I don't really push the limits yet. I did take the opportunity to wind the engine out up to it's redline a couple times though, as I've done most of my riding with the engine at lower rpm's so far and haven't really experienced that part of the rev range where it's making full power. Definitely breathtaking when she gets wound up like that. All was still good up until the final stretch of country road before coming back into town, a several miles long flat and straight run at a 55mph speed limit. Out of the blue the bike went from holding that perfectly straight line and smooth ride that it's so good at to a death wobble, with the bars careening side to side and the back end fishtailing around in either direction. The back tire, it seems, had run flat. I don't know how I did it, but I managed to pull it off onto a small side road and get stopped without laying the bike down. Sure enough, the rear tire was so flat it had unseated from the bead.
Now, for my commute to and from work I normally carry a backpack, and in that backpack along with my laptop and lunch I have a small toolkit. The backpack was at home today. But my fiance was already out and about and not far from where I was stopped, having gone out in the same direction to meet her cousin for some ice cream. She happened to be on her way back when the phone rang, so I had only about a ten minute wait until she could come get me. We were able to get home and return to where the bike was at with my truck within a half hour, with a few tools and a small air compressor which had about 120psi stored in the tank. A kind passerby stopped, which was a good thing because it took all three of us to get the bike up onto the center stand (the Yamaha XS Eleven Special has a curb weight north of 600lbs). I managed to re-seat the tirer bead by filling the tire with starting fluid and lighting it, then started pumping it with air and quickly found the leak. It turned out to me a pretty massive puncture, looked to be from a large nail.
What I didn't have among my little toolkit, but have been meaning to get, is a puncture kit. So we were about to head off to grab one from a store, but about this time the guy who owned the farmstead I was broken down in front of came out and asked if we needed any assistance. He laughed when I told him we were about to go to a store and grab a puncture repair kit and said that with all the tires he has on the farm of course he's got one in the barn and that he'd be right back. Now this is why I love country folk. True to his word he returned about five minutes later with everything needed to plug a puncture hole and we struck up a conversation while fixing the tire. He was a super nice guy who it sounds like lived an extraordinarily interesting life. A retired family doctor, who had taken over a two generation family practice in a much smaller nearby town that I lived in myself for about five years after calling it quits with my first wife. My daughter played saxophone in the school band while we lived there, and he had been the on-call doctor for the football team before retirement, so we laughed about watching the local team lose ten games in a row like clockwork each season. I'll never forget his kindness and willingness to help a complete stranger. It definitely went a long way towards renewing my faith in humanity.
In short order the tire was patched, and there was just enough air left in the tank of the little compressor I brought out to get it filled. I didn't want to trust it on the way home, and besides my SO can't drive my truck due to the tired old manual transmission, so I got it loaded up into the bed and strapped down, scaring Chrystal half to death with the way I got a runnning start and rode right up the ramp like Evil Kenievel (the doctor/farmer joking that I was probably going to just jump the truck to show off for her) and strapped into the tire chock.
I tend to just go into problem solving mode at times like this and yesterday was no different. So it was only later, after we were safely home with the bike unloaded (another scary procedure involving riding backwards down the ramp) that it really hit me just how lucky I had been. That tire lost all of it's air within a matter of seconds, and I was doing a good 60mph at the time. I shoul be dead, or at the very least in a hospital. The fact that I got the bike brought to a stop, off the main road, without laying it down is very humbling. I'm not much on the concept of a higher power, but it felt like someone was looking out for me yesterday. Then to have not one, but two different strangers stop what they were doing to offer assistance, well, I'm at a loss for words about it.
I'm not letting the experience stop me from riding of course. But I'm going to just replace that tire rather than riding on the patch. And I'll always have it in the back of my mind just how badly wrong thins can potentially go, which tends to keep you more alert and careful.
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