A Season Ending Injury

Earlier in the summer we had all our girls here to visit and had gone on a bike ride to a park so we could find this little island Erdbeere had seen before and wanted to find again.  Well, we did end up finding it, after some hiking way into the back of the park.  The island, it turns out, is easy to see but a little more challenging to get to.  But its a fun hike because once you get there, there is a little stone path, or bridge, out to the island.     

June 2019

That was back in June.  Well, as mentioned, the island is easier to see than to get to.  Anyway, late in the year we got a lot of rain.  Its been a wet year and water levels have been near record height all summer anyway.   I recently noticed that the path out to the island was underwater so I wanted to get a picture and let Erdbeere see.  So this one day, after work when the weather was real nice, I hustled home from work, changed clothes, and headed out on my bike to get that picture, among other things.

September 2019

So, after riding a ways I got to the island and got my picture.  This was taken from the opposite direction as the first picture.  The tree at the left, on the island, is the tree Blaubeere was standing by in the June picture. The path, which was sticking up out of the water several inches in June, was totally submerged in the September picture.  Lots of rain.

So after I got that picture, I continued on my ride.  A couple of miles later I entered a nature reserve and was back in the trees.

It was getting to be fall and the leaves were beginning to get serious about turning colors and I was thinking I needed to make sure I got up this way a lot more as fall continued.

The evening shadows and the fall colors are such a beautiful combination.

I stopped for a quick selfie and then got on my way ...

... deeper into the reserve.  All kinds of fall colors and vegetation.

Pretty soon I was on the trail out of the reserve and on to my next stop.

Maybe its a weakness of mine, but I sometimes like to stop for ice cream when I'm out on my bike.  So I did this time, too.  This was shaping up to be another really nice ride.  My route home took me down along the river, through the trees, one of my favorite stretches of trail.  As I was getting just a few miles from home I noticed that my app was telling me I would just break 16 miles on this trip.  That was a happy thing.  I continued on my way, hurrying to get home before the sun went down.  Alas, I never made it.  Just a short distance from home, I was hit from behind by a car.

I have no memory of getting hit.  Except a couple of fleeting images, the next thing I remember clearly was waking up near midnight in the hospital.

I was a mess of broken bones, scrapes, cuts, and abrasions.  I can now say I have had "road rash"; its no fun.  My bike was all messed and bent up.  My bike season is suddenly over.  However, I am planning on being fully recovered in time to be out again in the spring, when bike season begins again.