It turns out that enough of my posts elude to this story that I figured I’d better get it written.

Hopping on a bike in Ireland has been amazing. That’s not even a big enough WORD for it! The tight curves, the gorgeous vistas, the incomprehensible age of everything around me; it all continuously steals my breath. There have been times of fear as well, however. Like that time when I thought I was going to lay it down coming around a deceptively tight curve on my way to Kinsale.

You know those pictures of bikers on a track when their knees are nearly touching the asphalt? Yeah…that was me…and I could have sworn I saw sparks flying in my mirror off the foot peg on THAT one! It was made all the more exciting by the look of shock and awe on the face of the fella driving the white van headed straight for me. I can tell you he had blue eyes and was missing at least one tooth.

So I leaned in hard, made the curve, righted her again and leaned in to the next one. Incredible. Exhilarating! Mind blowing riding! Without time to think about how close I’d just been to getting intimately acquainted with the bumper of the toothless, blue-eyed guy’s van, I just rode through the adrenaline.

But this next one really shook me up.

It was a few days later and I was leaving Killarney. I’d had a great time my first night hanging out with Mike, but the next night was pretty tame to ensure I was on top of my game the next morning.

I entered the round-a-bout, yielding to traffic on my right and proceeded towards the third exit. Unfortunately, a big lorry entered from my left, failed to yield to me, and proceeded to drive straight for me. I only caught him out of the corner of my eye because I assumed traffic would yield to me as I was on their right. He didn’t. He kept coming. By the time I realized he had no intention of stopping I was squeezed into the centre of the round-a-bout. This wouldn’t have been an issue were it not for the 6-8″ curb encasing the flower bed and statue in the centre of the round-a-bout.

Squeezed in and pee-my-pants (not really) scared, I was over as far as I could go, my front tire was kissing the curb and I was going down. I came down on the curb and the bike came down on me. And the lorry was STILL coming! I had huge in-my-face visions of a whole lot of squish-ed-ness as he was only inches from my front tire.

I scurried out from my between the BMW F 700 GS and the hard concrete curb and looked around. Surely someone would stop and help me out of this pickle! Traffic zipped by and the fella in the car behind me sat gaping and waiting for me to get out of his way.

DUDE!

I marched up to his window, knocked, and asked if he’d help me pick her up so I could clear the round-a-bout and get out of his way. It’s a big bike and I’m clearly not a big person to lift her up alone! He did, I hopped on and zipped off thinking only about clearing the round-a-bout before I found myself in trouble again.

It wasn’t until much later that I thought about having been within inches of that truck…