Hazardville

Today I went out on the Victory for an exploratory ride -- instead of taking one of my usual favorite routes, I decided I would scope out the roads in northeast Connecticut leading to a roadside restaurant -- the Vanilla Bean -- that I've been wanting to try after seeing a write-up of it in a motorcycle magazine. I wanted to see if I could find a good route now, so that when my wife decides it's warm enough to ride with me, I can take her there without getting lost.

Which is what I ended up doing today. I screwed up two turns and ended up getting turned around and heading WEST instead of EAST. Although I didn't get to the Vanilla Bean, it wasn't a total loss -- I had a nice ride and saw some interesting roads, and learned a little bit more about that part of Connecticut.

So I decided to head back home on some roads with which I was familiar. Route 190 would take me west to Enfield, CT, and from there I could just blast up Route 91. I decided to stop at a video store along the way to see if the DVD of the movie "The Wrestler" had come out yet (it hasn't). Coming out of the store and putting my helmet on, my eye was caught by something odd on my rear tire -- it looked like a stick caught in the tread. On closer exmination -- as you can see from these photos -- it was no stick.





Nope, it as a long, rusty nail in my rear tire -- just the thing you want to see when you're forty miles from home. Looking at it some more, I couldn't tell if it had actually punctured the tire (which would let air out) or just poked through the sidewall. I decided to take a chance on it, based on my observation of it and the fact that the tire seemed to be completely fine, pressure-wise. But it was a slightly white-knuckle ride home, and I was glad to roll into my garage. The tire still seems to be as firm as before, and I didn't notice any odd squirmy behavior during the ride... but it's going to have to be replaced. The weird thing is that this nail COULD have been in the tire for days, weeks, mabe even months without me noticing it.

Oh, and the town where I stopped to go into the video store? Hazardville, CT. -- PL