On my route home from work, I have to go down a street with train tracks on the right side of the street. Normally it wouldn’t be an issue, since the train tracks are pretty far out, but this is San Francisco and there are always people double parked, construction work, etc. This makes those tracks very dangerous – because they run parallel to the street, it’s very hard to cross them at a steep angle, and you don’t cross them at a fairly steep angle, it’s easy to crash.
Which is exactly what I did today. I was going fairly slowly and being DAMN careful (I have a deep respect for railroad tracks, having crashed on them once before), but down I went.
Fortunately, I seem to have escaped with a nasty bruise and some scrapes on my right knee, and some kind of bruising on the back of my calf (my bike pedal probably landed on me). My handlebars were bent out of position, my chain slipped, and one of my shifters got skewed out of position, but nothing I couldn’t fix or adjust. The only thing I will have to replace is my helmet, and that’s less about damage (I think I only popped the visor off) and more about my own paranoia. As the MasterCard commercial goes, “Helmet: $60. Skull: priceless.”
So, despite the fact that the helmet looks fine, I’m in the market for a new one. Guess I’ll be driving in for the next few days.
Moral of the story: next time, if it isn’t a right angle, I WALK across! It’s better than scraping myself off the pavement yet again.
Off for some more ibuprofen…
Ouch! Hope things heal quickly.