Sunday I headed out to ride with a friend so I stopped for gas. Nothing worse than beginning a ride low on fuel. I was on the Bonneville and there was another rider at the station so I had to answer questions. What year is that? Oh I didn’t know Triumph still made motorcycles. What is the engine size? And so on and so forth.
This made me a little late so I was rushing, but I still saw it all unfold. I saw the driver approach the stop sign at the intersection on my left. She stopped, looked both ways (not effectively I might add), and entered the intersection right in front of me. I stopped, she looked at me and made some sort of idiotic gesture, and we went on our way. But this was just a harbinger of things to come.
We took some back roads to avoid Bangor traffic. That’s sort of and oxymoron, isn’t it. A long line of cars approached from the left as we waited to turn on to state route 222 from Davis Road. The last one had her right turn signal on and she slowed. I could tell she hit her breaks because the nose of the car pitched down. She began her right-hand turn on to Davis Road. I took this as a signal that the coast was clear to begin my right turn onto 222. The next thing I knew, a car sped past me on the left and cut me off as the driver pulled to the right shoulder. What? Was there another car? Where on earth did that car come from?
I pulled away from the scene, headed up the road, and stopped at the first available turn out. I asked John what he saw. Apparently what I feared was correct. The driver changed her mind and accelerated through the intersection missing me by only inches.
For guys my age: Never pass up a chance to piss, never waste a hard-on, and never trust a turn signal. (My apologies to Jack Nicholson).
