Merlin III
New member
I was hoping to start a thread where members can bring up safety tips or tell us about a close call and what they learned.
I will start it out with an incident that happened to me today. I usually wear all the gear all the time, but recently I started wearing only my helmet when only going down the road to the Post Office or the local grocery store.
So I am going along at 25MPH when I come to my one and only stop sign. I slowed down to a "crawl", looked left, then right, and then left again. I never came to a full stop and planted my feet. This was the classical left turn we constantly talk about cagers making. When I turned left the second time while proceeding at 5 mph a white pickup truck came quickly over the horizon from the left and would have hit me broadside if I hadn't managed to turn the bars sharply left at the last second. I also hit the front brake and came very near dropping the bike. Thank god for the CTXs low center of gravity. MY BMW would have gone down.
I usually always come to a full stop-feet planted, but this one time got lazy and it almost cost me big time. While I will never ride without a helmet, they do limit your ability to do quick head checks well. The helmet limits your peripheral vision and looking through a plastic face shield, even a good one, somewhat distorts your vision
I will start it out with an incident that happened to me today. I usually wear all the gear all the time, but recently I started wearing only my helmet when only going down the road to the Post Office or the local grocery store.
So I am going along at 25MPH when I come to my one and only stop sign. I slowed down to a "crawl", looked left, then right, and then left again. I never came to a full stop and planted my feet. This was the classical left turn we constantly talk about cagers making. When I turned left the second time while proceeding at 5 mph a white pickup truck came quickly over the horizon from the left and would have hit me broadside if I hadn't managed to turn the bars sharply left at the last second. I also hit the front brake and came very near dropping the bike. Thank god for the CTXs low center of gravity. MY BMW would have gone down.
I usually always come to a full stop-feet planted, but this one time got lazy and it almost cost me big time. While I will never ride without a helmet, they do limit your ability to do quick head checks well. The helmet limits your peripheral vision and looking through a plastic face shield, even a good one, somewhat distorts your vision