For as much as I enjoy riding my motorcycle, enjoy the freedom of the open road with wind in my face, I really dislike riding in the rain. It's not the drops that accumulate on my helmet visor at a stop light. It's not the soaked blue jeans that leave one frigid at 30 miles an hour. It's not the raindrops pelting my body at 40 miles an hour. It's not so much the horizontal streams of rain that fly by at 50 miles an hour. It's the streets that I perceive to be slicker than wet clay that give me the willies. I don't really mind the straightaways but, when I am coming to a turn, my hands grip the handlebars like a vice and my speed drops to almost a walk.
I have never gone down on a motorcycle in the rain. However, on a bicycle, I have gone down on wet surfaces three in the last year. None have resulted in lasting injury but the sure did hurt. I was crossing a wooden bridge on my mountain bike a couple of hours after the rain had ended and didn't realize there was still a glaze on the wood. In an instant I was on the ground and sliding. The other two times occurred on my road bike. One was in a downpour as I was heading home and I bounced on the concrete a couple of times. The other I was making a turn at decent speed on a slightly damp spot when my wheels slid out and I found myself looking up at the sky with quite an ache in my elbow.
Those incidents have made me cautious, perhaps overly cautious, such that I turn corners like a granny whenever the pavement is wet...slow and very wide. Perhaps it's time I found a safe place to practice my ridin' in the rain.
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