Well I guess that didn’t take too long. Tonight I had my first wipe out on my motorcycle, I wasn’t injured beyond a bruise on the inside of my left leg near my shin, and in fact I did not even go down. When all was said and done the bike went down under me and I ended up standing, straddling the bike.

I was pulling out of Nie Funeral home leaving Hayes’ wake and entering Carpenter Road when my back wheel spun out from under me and the bike went down on its right side and spun so it was horizontal in the road. I guess I should explain what happened.

When I left to go to the funeral home the weather was nice, and though I knew there was a chance of rain I saw no clouds and so opted to ride the motorcycle. After the viewing when I went outside I found that it had started to drizzle and the ground was now wet. I had actually made a comment to Tiffany that this was the worse time for me to be riding the bike, for multiple reasons. One reason is that I had never ridden in wet conditions before. Another is that I remember my instructor in the training class telling us that when it first starts to rain is a bad time to ride, this is because the initial rain just causes oils to be brought to the surface along with loose dirt causing slick conditions. With these things going through my mind and knowing it has only been raining for a few minutes I got ready to ride.

When I had pulled into the funeral home I noticed that the driveway entered the road at a fairly steep angle and that the blacktop of the driveway was of the shiny black slick type. Keeping all of this in mind, coupled with the wet surface, I proceeded very slowly and cautiously to the end of the driveway and waited until there was a very large gap between oncoming traffic for me to turn right into the road. Unfortunately all my precautions were not enough and my lack of experience won out.

When I attempted to turn right into the road my back tire was still on an incline coming out of the driveway, and when I started to make the turn it simply slid down the hill and spun out from under me, thus causing the fall. As I have previously mentioned I received very little damage, no more than a bruise. Thankfully the bike received little damage as well, nothing more than a small dent and some scraps on the tail pipe.

I was able to pick the bike back up on my own and then ride it home. I am hoping that this will be my last and only incident, and that I have learned this lesson well. I think this could have been avoided if I had simply held in the clutch and simply allowed the bike to roll into the road completely and then tried to make the turn, as I think I had plenty of time to do that. I guess we will see next time.