Riding back from the office, the 405 is heavily congested, splitting lanes between the two left most lanes, going 25-30 mph, suddenly “oh, shit” moment came. I have had a couple of close calls in my short riding history. The most recent one was when I came under attack of a clueless Prius. But this one tops them. As Motodisiac said before “it wasn’t such a close call because you saw it coming.” This one is my first REAL “oh, shit” moment. And I did not see it coming.

I left the office a little after 6pm geared up in my new riding pants - Rev’it Ultimate (gear review is coming up soon). I received them just today and could not wait to try them out. The freeway was unusually congested, with more than usual merging activity. I did not want to push it and was going not faster than 30mph in a standstill traffic. I was just picking up my speed after squeezing through a somewhat tight opening when THAT happened. I noticed an old pickup truck in the lane on my left. And as I was passing it the right door opened and a guy came out. Years of competitive sports came to my rescue. I quickly reacted and weaved right just enough to dodge the opening door. A couple of seconds later I slowed down and screamed the F word. I felt it was a good stress release at the moment. Obviously noone heard it.

I was lucky that the door did not get opened all the way. What puzzles me is why in the world would you want to get out of your car on a jam packed freeway. What was the guy thinking will remain unknown. In any event thank God everything is fine and noone got hurt. By the way it is questionable who’d get hurt worse - me all geared up and wearing a helmet (I religiously follow the AGATT principle - All Gear All The Time) or the passenger of that truck who would have been hit by approx 500lbs of weight at 30mph speed.

Lesson learned - be extra careful. Ignorance and stupidity has no limits.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 4th, 2007 at 11:44 pm and is filed under Motorcycles, Street, Auto, Trucks, Riding. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.