Had a bad day yesterday. On the final leg of our 2400 mile trip, cruising on Rt 218E outside of Fredericksburg, VA, around 11am. I'm leading, my wife behind me on her Vulcan. I check my mirror and notice she isn't there. Not unusual on twisty roads. I pull over and wait. She doesn't show. So I turn around, figuring she had her highway peg come loose again or something like that. I'm going and going, no sign of her. Finally I come around a curve and she's standing there on the side of the road, on the phone. I attempt to make a U turn on a road that is banked and going uphill, and drop the bike. The Canyon Cages worked perfectly, no damage at all to the bike. Picked it up, got it off the road. If that was the worst part of my day, it would have been good.
The rest of this is off topic for accessories, more of a rider down thing, but this is what had happened...
I say "where's your bike?" She says "down there, I crashed". I ran over to her, she's all banged up. Split lip, bumps and scrapes all over her. She later told me she had gone around the curve and started scraping her floorboards, but not just the momentary scrape, it was long and sustained, and she panicked because she knew she was going to go too wide and hit the guardrail. So she decided rather than hit the guardrail, she was going to go off the road where someone else had already removed the guardrail in a prior accident. She went off the road, hit a couple orange barrels, got airborne, and landed in the ravine, the bike low sided, and she slid about 30' into the brush. Stayed with the bike the whole time, when it came to rest she was still holding onto the bars.
The ambulance came and took her to the ER, and I stayed and dealt with the police and the wrecker guy. It took us about a half hour to get the bike out of there in 100+ head.
Her bike is probably totalled, the left side is pretty torn up. Crash bar and floorboards are bent up into the shifter, all kinds of mangled parts. It's a shame because it was a nice bike and she finally had it customized the way she liked it.
They ran all kinds of tests on her, x-rayed and cat scanned everything. She has some ugly bruises, a huge one on her thigh and her arms and neck look like she got into a fight. Her left shoulder is really sore (along with everything else, but that is probably the worst part), She insists on wearing the piece of crap half helmet,so she has a nice knot under her eye and scratches all over her face from the brush. Some big bruises on her neck from the helmet strap and a cooling gel thing she had on. Not a single broken bone. One of her CAT's came back weird, so they wanted to transfer her to another trauma center, which was around 1am. I went back to a hotel room I had and the plan was for me to deal with the wrecker today and release the bike for the insurance company and get whatever I could off of the bike (she had clothes and stuff in the bags, but I couldn't get to one of them because of how the bike was down). Then I was going to ride 3hrs home, pick up our truck, ride 4 hours back to where she was, and bring her back. I called one of her friends yesterday when they said they were going to release her and she came down to take her home, but when they transferred her, I had the friend drop me off at my room and she was heading home. Well, she decided to stay somewhere else on the way to the 2nd trauma center and thankfully is there to bring her home so I don't have to drive another 8 hrs today.
I think how lucky she got with such minimal injuries for a 40mph wreck with no gear on. How lucky it was she didn't hit a tree, or crash on the roadway surface, because the grass and soft dirt definitely saved her. If she had been more severely hurt, I would have driven right by the accident scene, because you couldn't see her bike at all in the brush.
