…but since I fell on my head I didn’t hurt anything important.

All kidding aside, it was one of those “perfect storm” sort of accidents  and I could’ve been seriously hurt.  A guy in an oncoming car who stopped and told me that he saw the bike go over ejecting me off of it and all of a sudden I disappeared with a shoe flying up in the air.  What happened was when I fell off the bicycle I went over into a three foot deep drainage ditch in the brush along the side of the road.  I landed more or less upside down and on the back right side of my head,  which is not a good thing and when you had cervical spine surgery just three years ago.

The reason all that happened was as I said above the result of a perfect storm of events.   I was on a steep uphill portion of the road. Traffic was fairly heavy, so I was this close to the shoulder as possible. The  pavement at the edge of the road was extremely degraded and broken. The white line was right at the edge of the pavement. The dirt shoulder was about 6 to 12 inches/.2 to .3 meters wide.

I had just reached the effective end of the usefulness of my front mid-range gear and had shifted into high gear. My right foot was at the very top of the crank rotation. The high gear failed to immediately engage, and the resulting chain slippage allowed my right foot to go forward very fast, pulling me to the right and unbalancing the bike.  My front tire almost immediately caught the edge of the pavement and I went over.

The  aforementioned motorist said from what he had seen that he was certain I had been seriously injured. He wanted to call an ambulance. I was able to more or less stand right up and told him I was fine, but that I could not find my right shoe. It took a while to find it- it had flown about 10 feet/~3 meters further into the brush on the side of the road. What did hurt was my neck, which felt very achy when I turned my head from side to side. Visions of my trip being over right there filled my mind.  I walked the bike a few feet up the road to a driveway entrance and sat down on a rock ledge.

The pain in my neck at that point did not seem to be getting any better, but it also did not seem to be getting any worse. I said thank you to the various motorists who had by now stopped and offered assistance and decided to ride on for a while and see how I felt. So I rode about 10 miles/16 Km further from that point before deciding, out of an abundance of caution, to find a motel and stop early for the night. Within a short distance of making that decision the Atlantica Hotel beckoned.

The desk staff there was very sympathetic and concerned.  When I convinced them that, no, I didn’t need to go straight to a hospital and, yes, all I needed was just a room with a comfortable bed for the night, I was given one at what I am sure was a substantial discount, as it turns out the Atlantica is quite the fashionable resort property. But that’s story for another time.

I contacted Heather and informed her of what had happened.  I told her that I planned pretty much to head for bed and rest through to the next morning. I said that if my neck didn’t feel any better today or I awoke with other issues, I would head for a hospital.

And today I feel fine. Oh, there’s a little residual twinginess,  but it’s nothing I can’t deal with him and it’s not the kind that makes me apprehensive that something has really gone wrong and it’s just waiting to do me in. So my ride continues. I have tons of great pictures and a lot of route information to post, but that is dependent on a fast Internet connection wherever I spend the night. I’m at a Provincial Park tonight, so finding one is not all that likely. But I will be back on track, posting-wise, within the next few days.