Ironically, it wasn't a pothole that got me, John, not even a new one. In 2012 I was out riding in the false dawn, on the lane pictured above with the potholes, but on a section of it on the other side of the dangerous country road. Regardless of what sort of lamps you have -- right up to the Big Bang I had on test when it first came out -- you can only ride such lanes as fast as I do in the dark if you already know where the potholes and broken verges are. A degree of bike control is required.
I was coming down a familiar downhill section towards a lefthand turn. The part of the road I was on had only minor potholes, no bother to my maximum Big Apples, but a certain amount of unevenness from years of patching without a complete resurfacing. Also, the edges of the road were dangerously broken and in places dropped straight down 16-18 inches into the ditch. At 45kph, maybe 50, I hit a bump I knew about, a little ridge that I aimed for. I'd done this many, many times in both daylight and dark; so far this was a routine ride, at least when I'm alone (the pedal pals have neither bikes nor the inclination for this sort of riding). From there I would land about an inch from the edge of the road and pedaling hard push the motor wide open for the uphill left-hander, pulling the bike away from the lefthand edge where the bump threw me to the righthand edge to give me an apex on the lefthand turn. You can't do this on a lesser bike or lesser tyres, you understand: I tried on my very capable Gazelle Toulouse with Marathon Plus and front suspension, and all I succeeded in doing was smashing the suspension and falling into the ditch, even though I was traveling 15kph slower than on the Utopia. My Trek Smover, a pretty capable sporting bike from a sporting brand, was even slower than the Toulouse because it is stiffer, and I gave up because it shuddered with revulsion at that road on it's Bontrager Satellite Elite tyres, a Marathon Plus workalike but even harsher. (For the Toulouse and the Smover see
http://coolmainpress.com/BICYCLING.html) My Kranich just looks like someone's granddad's bike; it is awesomely capable though I don't imagine that 99% of the solid burghers who can afford it ride it like I do; they don't know what they're missing.
But on that morning, where in the dark I was supposed to find an inch of tarmac to land on before I fell into the ditch, a huge tractor had broken off two inches of the road, which of course I couldn't see; it wasn't just that the road was wet, but that at anything over 15kph it really doesn't matter whether you can see an irregularity in the road because you'll hit it within your reaction time. The bike dropped straight into the ditch, the axle on my vintage Phillips pedal snapped right off when it hit the road edge and ten feet further at around 50kph I hit a hillock washed into the ditch -- really a donga washed by heavy water -- and was thrown into the air far enough to fling up a hand so that the tree branches shouldn't poke out my eyes. When we landed again I flung the bike to the left into the hedge to save the irreplaceable paintwork (coachlined for me by a man of 89 who worked on the assembly line when my bike design was first built in 1936 -- I didn't quite see me explaining that I wanted him to do it over... you can perve the coach lining at
http://coolmainpress.com/AndreJute'sUtopiaKranich.pdf) from the rough edge of the tarmac, and myself onto the road beside me for fear that if I knocked myself out falling into the ditch I could drown.
There I lay for about fifteen minutes, counting my blessings, and threatening to feed the pony in the field opposite who came to laugh at me to my wife's cats. Then I erected myself like Frankenstein's monster slowly rising to consciousness, fetched my bike out of the soft hedge, inspected the paintwork by the daylight flashing lamp, which slides off the mount and turns into a torch at the press of a button, then inspected the damage to my clothes and myself (bruising and abrasions but nothing serious), then drank some hot tea (Lady Grey with extra lime and honey) to settle the adrenaline, then completed the ride one-leggedly, and took a hot bath for the aches and pains.
The bike was unscathed but the vintage pedals had to be written off, much to my disgust because they suited me well and had cost quite a bit of money from a British collector of bicycle components, and there were none NOS available, and no spare parts either.
