I is for Inn#

Sat Sep 14 17:29:05 2024

i is for Inn (and based on the name, possibly also for Intolerance; Religious, Historical). But I didn't go in the inn, because after parking up and locking my bike, I realized I'd left my wallet at home.

From that point things started to deteriorate. I took hold of my bike and started to wheel it backwards, and after a few centimetres it stopped with a cracking noise, which turned out to be the disk lock on the front wheel breaking the mudguard.

On the way home the low fuel light came on, so I pulled into a petrol station. Fortunately, after unlocking the tank and readying the hose, I remembered before I actually dispensed any petrol that I'd left my wallet at home and therefore had no means of payment.

When I reached home, I stopped outside the house on a funny bit of camber, and dropped the bike on its right hand side. Fortunately (this is getting to be a theme) it landed on the crash bung and did no damage, as far as I can tell, to anything. There might have been some scratching on the fairing or exhaust, but they were both scratched already when I bought the bike. Also fortunately I remembered from my DAS classes how to pick it up and it's not an especially heavy bike.

Ride report overall summary: aargh. On the bright side, there's only a small chunk broken off the mudguard, so things could have been worse in at least three different ways.

"Inn" for I was a bit of a cop-out in the first place. I wanted to ride out towards Finchingfield but I didn't think I'd have time to get there, so I picked a village along the way (Great Dunmow) and then looked for something in that village starting with I.

In other news, apparently TfL offer a free two hour session of 1:1 motorbike training for anyone who lives or works in London. It seems to be aimed at learner riders but it's open to full licence holders too, and run by one of the better training schools, so am going to see if I can get some of that.