Posts
263
Joined
8/15/2006
Location
Not The End of the World, but you can see it from here, AB
CA
Edited Date/Time
11/14/2014 8:41am
Those things are dangerous! Owww...
The Shop
Sorry you got cleaned out r_outsider...Glad you are still here to make fun of us minivan drivers...
Anyway, he basically got me in the left leg, sheered the left peg off the bike and got me in the back of my arm with the wing mirror, and tweaked my back pretty good in the whole process as well, as I was falling over the van hit the Tahoe. I'm secretly hoping for early onset Alzheimer's, because the whole scene of the initial WTF moment when I was hit and the Tahoe being picked up and shoved forward with that much force (it was an impressive thing to have a front row seat to for sure) and the sudden realization of what just happened is basically on non-stop repeat in my head now. Collapsed the front of the van all the way to the windshield.
So Tahoe guy and myself were both admitted to hospital, I was there for 8 days and became familiar with some terms you really don't want to be familiar with, such as "degloved." Don't look it up. And if you've heard that when they do skin grafts that the donor site hurts worse than the patched site, that is 2000% completely true (that was another 5 days in the hospital, too). I'm recovering nicely though. MXers are tough and fast healers, apparently. Hopefully I'll regain enough strength and flexibility to ride again, both in the dirt and out. Working pretty hard on it.
You didn't get degloved did you?
Because if he had a history of epilepsy he absolutely deserves to be taken to the cleaners for driving with that condition. This could easily been SO much worse.
As for the fear, this kind of thing lingers in the back of most of our minds, I think. I was always prepared to deal with the consequences of my own actions, but being at the mercy of other people is a bit unsettling. Look at it this way, though. The odds of another Motodriver being smoked from behind by another minivan driving epileptic are now astronomical. Things do happen on the road, but I'm the guy who got it, and I'll be back next year. Not sure if I'll ever ride in commuter traffic again, though. Too many people not doing what they should be doing all at the same time.
How do these guys keep their licenses, anyway? I know they lose them for a year after an episode, but now that I've done as much reading on the subject as I have, the stats are frightening. It really is a matter of when, not if, and everybody else on the road is at the mercy of a medical condition that can never be cured. Even just controlling it over the long term is apparently pretty tricky.They can't get a commercial license, why should a private vehicle be any different? They are victims of an unfortunate condition, but there's plenty of others out there whose medical problems render them unfit for what really is an inherently dangerous task.
I had a sport bike at one time but all the fears of not knowing what your surroundings can do to you eventually got to me. I sold the bike a couple of years after buying it and I fortunately never even laid it over. I'll stick to the dirt. Granted, it's all dangerous, but at least my fate is in my hands moreso than on the road I believe.
I was ready to buy my wife an Tahoe, I had a great one all picked out and ready to do...and she didn't want it, she wanted the Toyota Sienna minivan...
Pit Row
Villapoto could drive anything he wants to take his bike to the track here in Europe, so what's he using? A VAN.
Sorry for hijacking the thread - I hope you nail him so hard he can never afford to buy another vehicle to risk other people's lives again.
First, you have to understand that trucks are basically the logical extension of the old horse drawn farm wagon (stay with me now...). You also need to understand that, until fairly recently, North America as a whole was quite a bit more rural than Jolly Olde, and even now there's way more space. People in the old days would take the wagon into town once every few months to sell stuff they'd grown and made on the farm and load up with supplies, so you needed a vehicle with some capacity. When Model T's started springing up everywhere, people started converting them for basically the same use, and on it went. Eventually, North America got a lot more urbanized, but there's still quite a bit of rural culture left.
The other reason is, when you come right down to it, they're very handy vehicles to have. The modern ones are very comfortable places to be for a long time, there's room for them for the most part on the roads, and fuel is less expensive over here. You can toss whatever you need in them, and they can pull a lot of weight. Plus, when you get right down to it, if you live where some of us do, in winter, you almost need to own a high ground clearance 4x4 vehicle just to get out of the driveway some days. I know several blokes from Blighty (mostly from the Midlands, don't know why that is), all of them switched to trucks eventually, because they're largely the right vehicle for the situation. But a truck wouldn't make a lick of sense in England.
If I lived in a city or a heavily urbanized area...there would be no need for a truck, at all.
I get the trucks...what I don't get are the 6 in lift, 38 inch tires, trucks...those, I just don't get...but to each his own.
But I will say this about the sienna...those power sliding doors...awesome!
no injuries to anybody though so that is good.
only pain i have is a slowwwwwwwwwwww ins company
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