I sent the following post to the Wheelmen forum, my small brethren of fellow HiWheel bike riders, on Monday before I went out for a training ride here in Ireland on the Eagle:

At our new National Bicycle Greenway blog, I just finished the tedious job of consolidating all my blogs into our one new one. Using the category tool, I can now really show Ireland off, rough roads and all.

http://bikeroute.com/NationalBicycleGreenwayNews/category/Ireland

For those of you who have seen any of my old blogs, the old posts don’t hold a candle to how we have Ireland looking now. Making use of the new exciting plugins at WordPress.org, in particular the image tools, I think we have the Emerald Isle looking pretty darn good 🙂

Well, I enjoyed my miles and yet not far from my house I got launched into a deep puddle from eight feet up. The face plant I did broke a rib, bruised an elbow, hand and knee and had swelled my right thigh so bad to take anti-inflammatory medication just so I could walk on it.

It was on the edge of the road not far from a concrete curb that my front wheel got swallowed up by a pothole. You see, a car vying for the sliver of dry asphalt I occupied had ever so slightly forced me into an innocuous looking puddle made to look tame by how well improved the rest of the immediate area looked (see the picture above). Even though there was no shoulder, as such, there still looked to be asphalt beneath the water. And yet what the rain water covered was a virtual land mine I could not have known was there. And come to think of it, it is so often filled with rain water that I’ll bet the city doesn’t even know it’s there………

Getting thrown over the bars on a HiWheel bike designed to make the header I took almost impossible tells me someone else might not be as lucky. On a regular bike, serious head and shoulder injuries would have resulted. My recumbent would have fared better. But not much. And a traditional HIWheel could very well have produced a lethal result

As such, I have used the last few days to rest. There is a lot of excitement that Lori Yung is working into our new National Bicycle Greenway map and Ray Irvin has a ton of propitious ideas that he wants to bring to bear for the NBG but fortunately for me in terms of timing, both of them are now consumed by the Holiday season. As such the rest I am forced to take will take me off the NBG map and organization front burners and get me the time I need to get our NBG Biking City program current.

I took the bent out today to snap the photo above and hope to ride it a lot longer this weekend. I also want to be back on the Eagle with which I have to make some small repairs by the following weekend. But indeed do know that the NBG will be coming into 2014 with amazing new maps, an updated NBG Biking Cities program and a bold plan of action, all that I know that you will want to be a part of

THX 4 all of U!!

Btw: See Ireland’s Biggest Pothole

Note: Pope John Paul II landed on the airstrip that used to occupy this area when he visited Ireland in 1979. There was even a successful transatlantic flight that launched from here in 1972. While the small train station that could have been used to make this an important transportation center is still there, sadly the planes and their runway gave way to the retail/industrial park that took its place in 2001.