"Trial by Fire" (I must have been insane)

[Blondie]

TRIAL BY FIRE …or thunderboomers and hail as the case may be! :eek:

Saturday (13 Sept) BlkPirate was kind enough to give my baby her first oil change (Thanks Pirate!).
The weather going there was perfect riding weather. Comfortable temps and just as I’d get a tad bit toasty from the sun a cloud would come along and cool me off. Fabulous weather for riding.
After the oil change I just hung for a while and BS-ed with Pirate. When I looked at the clock I realized it was going to get dark in a few hours and I personally prefer sunlight vs. moonlight to ride in. So I took off. Since it takes 1.25 hours to get home, I’d be getting home just as dusk progresses to dark. Or so I thought!!

As I hit I-81 in the distance I saw some nasty looking lightening, with some big, *MEAN & Ugly* looking storm clouds. You could even see the rain wall!!
Turns out it wasn’t so far in the distance after all! About 4 miles before Rt. 66 I ran smack into it!

I thought, OK, I’ll out run it and get in front of it. I never accomplished that feat!

What should have been a 1.25 hour ride and as dusk turned to dark and I would have been under a beautiful full moon, turned into a nightmare of a deluge of rain, hail, lightening and NO where to hide from it.

There were no over passes and all the exits along the way (until you hit Rt.17 to Warrenton – 50 minutes in good weather from Winchester) lead you to some Podunk town whose entire population consists of 1 farmer and his cows and/or field of whatever he’s growing. I did find one exit with an Exxon gas station and since I needed gas, I thought, good place to ‘hide’. Yeah right – as I pulled into the gas station I swore I heard a Banjo playing “dueling banjos”. The movie “Deliverance” came to mind as well as the thought “Damn why did I leave the gun home???”
I topped off the tank and promptly got back into the downpour.

I had wiped down the inside and outside of the windshield when I stopped as well as the same for my glasses – that of course didn’t last long. The glasses promptly got drenched and started fogging up and the windshield of course was no better for seeing through.

As if it wasn’t bad enough, hail started. I hunkered down to protect my face. Since I couldn’t see through the windshield anyway, why not hunker down behind it. In doing so, I discovered a new purpose for the vent on the GL1800 windshield…. Yep, you guessed it, that’s what I used to look through the rest of the way home (which took another 1.5 hours). Yes, I got spray on my glasses (like more was going to matter at this point!) but at least I had a small (mind you VERY small) field of vision! Through the vent I was able to sort-a see the white lines on the road. Thank G-d no one was in front of me the majority of the way home – also thank goodness no one stopped in front of me as I never would have seen them looking through the vent until I was right on top of them (literally).

When I got back to the house, after drying off of course, I was curious about the storm so I jumped on the noaa.gov web site and looked at the RADAR. When looking at RADAR, green is usually light rain, yellow heavy rain, red thunderboomers and purple is run and hide and stay away from the windows. The thunderboomer that I stayed right in the middle of the entire way was a reddish/purple. I looked at the radar’s lightening strikes – they were literally all around me the entire way. Apparently I also road through two areas that were under tornado warnings. If I could have found a safe place to get off and waited an hour the storm would have stayed an hour ahead of me. According to the radar, I literally stayed right in the heart of the storm the entire trip. I was following it or was it following me?? LOL.

I have to admit, I drove through some hellacious shin deep puddles once in my neighborhood and I figured they would tear off my ground effects – but they held true! My ‘baby’ handled like a dream in that deluge of rain (and going through the puddles). Never once did I lose traction or have the sensation of “floating” even though I was STUPID enough to be averaging 45-50mph most of the way on 66. (Yes, 45-50mph was VERY STUPID considering I was riding completely blind, but I just kept hoping I’d find my way out of the storm!!).

So both my Trike and I have had our “Trial by fire”
...and rain and hail and lightening and wind ;-)

[Nana]

Sounds like your baby deserves a nice warm bath and a good polish! Glad you are safe.

[katfish16]

Blondie, glad U R safe. We can relate to what U went through. The first long trip we made on the trike we stayed in rain and thunder storms for 6 hrs. Cathy kept hitting me on the back telling me to pull over but there was no where to pull over. we were on some back roads in Alabama heading to Florida. Needless to say I was sore from being beatern up and she even called me some names . ha Women !!!!! she never even said she was sorry.