I could hear some traffic approaching from behind, so I did not veer into the traffic lane to avoid the cobble field, braked as hard as I could but not quite enough, hit the cobbles and crashed.
No serious damage, walked oddly for about a week or two from a very sore knee.
I'm sorry to hear you got bruised, George.
We have a similar sort of hazard here: low-lying tree branches over the lanes. They clear the top of the SUVs in common use hereabout, but on my bike my head is above the roof of a Range Rover. Since I often ride in the dark, with BUMM lamps that have a vertical cutoff, I don't even see them before they knock me off my bike by hitting me in the face. It doesn't happen often, because I ride familiar lanes and mark all the low-flying branches (and potholes and other road irregularities) on daylight rides, but it discourages fast riding after dark on lanes I hadn't ridden in daylight for more than a few days.
The other oddity is a single crossroads in the countryside, other side of town from where yesterday the pothole hurt two cyclists, nothing to distinguish from all the other minor crossroads. I was cycling up the slight incline to the crossroads and, though I wasn't going fast, had stopped pedaling to give a truck I could hear but not see over the hedgerows a chance to cross or turn before me. The next thing I knew I was on the tarmac with the bike on top of me and the truck, which had turned the corner, lurching towards me as the driver braked hard. The truck stopped with a few feet to spare and the driver came to help me up. He told me the corner is known to all the "flatsiders" (or "hardsides", paneled trucks and large vans) as having anomalous, unpredictable gusts of wind strong enough to endanger a truck, apparently over the hill from the river-valley beyond but for no reason one can tell from the visible topography. I had nothing broken but hurt enough to be foul-tempered when I hobbled into my doctor's surgery. "You won't die," he said cheerfully as I walked in. "How the •¶§∞ would you know?" I snapped. "You walked in here," he said, a killer argument because it was obviously true. I was bruised from knee to armpit for weeks, and pretty extensively scabbed too from road rash. Thing is, I'd ridden there a couple of decades, passing or turning at the crossroads more than a hundred times every year, and the wind had never caught me before.
