So there we were... Me and Paul "Given'r" over a cattle guard through the grassy planes of the Douglas lk road.
When Paul hit it..... his left pannier box decided to eject from the bike ( I think it was a way to prevent the "DR" from passing him) at about 90kph.... right in front of me !!
Well the damn thing hit the hard- pack about 20 feet in front of my front wheel and I thought "Hollie crap...... I gotta hit the brakes "!!
But as soon as it contacted the ground it immediatly hit an rpm of what I would estimate to be about 10,000rpm !!
Then I realized that " Hay ... I have lots of time to stop" It traveled about 110 feet before it stoped on the road right in front of me.
Russ and JZ pulled up right behind me and stopped. We all said the same thing.." Did you see that fkn thing fly man,, HOLY CRAP"!and man we had a good laugh !!
Meanwhile ol-Paul, sensing the DR was still right on his a**, held er full throttle and disappeared over the gentle hill and arround the long sweeping set of corners that lay ahead.,, andthe three of us listened for a good 5 - 10 min and could still hear the rumble of the ol- Katoom in the distance! Well what were we to do ? Guess we might as well call this a break time. So we settled back on the side of the road in a grassy field under a tree in the shade and had a beer.
I went over to the pannier box and was kinda leary of
opening it cuz I thought he had his beer in it and because of the speed it was spinning at , all I could think of was what happend to Holmer's beer that Bart Simpson took to the paint shop and put in the paint shaker/ mixer !! ( It created a mushroom cloud seen for miles in the Springfield area) ! When I opened it up , all I saw was a mapbook at the top,, and all was dry.
Round about 15-20 min later....Paul finally decided to re-join us.
The look on his face was Priceless!!!! He had turned arround but was still not aware that his panner box had fallen off. When he saw his box in the middle of the road he was pretty surprised.
As we talked about it and told Paul what the contents of the panner box had just gone through he laughed and said " Wouldn't that have looked cool if it had actually blowen up . Cuz my tools and bottle of camp stove fuel were in there "!
Well HOLY crap !!! The vision of this pannier box flying off a bike at high speed and bursting into flames was too much to handle..... I laffed sooooo hard that it felt like a bone was coming through my ribcage!!
So paul decided to head back and try to find the broken retainer that had caused the box to "FLY" off. It was about 1 hour and 15 min later that he showed up back at the tree with out the lost piece.
This will always be one of those events on a ride that I will NEVER forget....
Good times man !!!! All in the name of Given'r !
