[CR]Most spectacular crash in your teens

(Example: Framebuilders:Bernard Carré)

To: classicrendezvous@bikelist.org
From: "Bianca Pratorius" <biankita@earthlink.net>
Date: Fri, 14 Oct 2005 10:29:37 -0400
Subject: [CR]Most spectacular crash in your teens

All this talk about what you rode at 17 is great. I haven't enjoyed a CR topic more in my five years with you people.

This reminds me of the spectacular crashes that I lived through in my teens but couldn't imagine surviving now. It seems I was made of rubber back then.

When I was 13 I was riding down the sidewalk while turning left to look at a passing motorcyclist in the road. When I turned bacl to look ahead, a patrol car was turning onto the sidewalk to enter the park. Too late, and I hit the right front fender, went over the hood, dented my head (I still have it) and slammed one thigh against the fender so hard that I had trouble walking for a couple of days. Nothing happened to the bike. The two policemen put me in the car and took me to Roosevelt hospital where I was examined, bandaged and promptly taken back to my mother's apartment. Nice guys. I was back riding later that week.

Once in Central Park during the weekend where the main road is closed to vehicular traffic, I was coming down the harlem hill so fast that somehow I lost it and for the next 10 seconds the bike and I bounced down the hill with me actually sometimes looking down at the bike and sometimes looking up at it as we rebounded like super balls. If I remember I was smoking something earlier which might have helped me stay loose. I was wearing sweat pants and a sweater which helped cushion the blows, but I was amazed that neither the bike nor myself seemed in any way damaged by the incident.

Chalking it all up the the miracle of youth, I am Garth Libre in Miami Shores Fl.