For the last couple years, my sister has hosted an Easter get together. Given my knee problems and how the clock is getting ever closer to when I'm supposed to hop on my bike and head for Florida, I decided to ride there to get a sense on how my knee would react.
Originally I was going solo, but at the last minute, Captain Bob decided he would join me. We decided to mostly ride our standard route. We did decide to avoid the bastard hill by swinging over to Route 206. From there we wound through Princeton until we got back on track.
About 3 miles from sis's, we were going through an intersection. I was about 20 feet behind the captain. As I watched helplessly, a gold Hyundai went about halfway past the captain and turned right.
The captain was down.
The woman did stop about 20 feet up the cross road. I asked the captain if he was alright, etc. He said he was OK and actually seemed to be. Turned out that he didn't have even the smallest patch of road rash. The most significant problem was a broken helmet.
The woman moved her car in to a parking lot. I fiddled with my Droid camera trying to figure out how it worked. I figured I should take pictures of what I could for record keeping. Most importantly, I wanted to get a pic of the rear of her car in case she bolted so I'd have the license number (turns out those fears were completely unfounded).
We moved our bicyles over to where she had parked. She was about to give out her info when the police came. The most amazing part was that any given time, there must have been at least 3 police/EMT vehicles there. Another would come and one would go. By the end there must have been 8-12 different vehicles show up.
The EMTs felt up the captain, took his blood pressure, etc. The captain refused treatment and they called off the ambulance.
I called my sister and related just a bit of information to get their imagination going. I basically said that we were delayed and I was trying to keep the captain out of jail.
Captain Bob declined filing a report so the last police officier left and we got on our way. His front fender was rubbing the tire so we performed a quick adjustment and then really got on our way.
About a mile down the road as we were discussing the accident, the captain ran in to a curb and went down again. This time, the blood was flowing all over the place. It was like the Monty Python Black Knight skit.
Somehow we dealt with accident 2. We had to adjust his fender again, but then we were on our way.
The rest of the trip was uneventful and we got to sis's without further incident.
But after a while, the captain was on the cell phone talking to Mrs. Captain. She isn't at sis's because Mrs. Captain is visiting her daughter for Easter. She has gotten back to Pennsylvania. Just to the I78 tollbooth. Her car has died.
Fortunately, AAA was on the way and that seemed to end well as the last I heard Mrs. Captain was back and home with her dead car. Captain called when he got home later that night. We'll have to see how he is after his doctor visit.
