No need to worry leddies an gents..........Lucy's absolutely fine.......amazingly so after the spectacular tumble she took.
We were doing about 40ish up a gorge road out of Les Guillaumes....BHT up front, Lucy in the middle and me at the back......Paul scared a Chamois out from behind a rock in the cliff to our right.......the little bugger bolted for it, right under Lucy's front wheel.......she had absolutely no chance of avoiding it whatsoever......
It went under the wheel, bounced around a bit under the bike and then as the rear went over it, Lucy went down to her right......the bike skidded around 50 feet, Lucy slightly less.....but watching her slide was a bloody scary long moment....particularly when her head bashed into the cliff face.
Luckily the three of us had fallen into a good safe positioning/distance habit over the previous few thousand miles well over 2k covered since we waved the lightweights off) and i pulled up in plenty of time, parked up, hazards on as Lucy stood up.
If it hadn't have been so close to being seriously tragic, it actually would have been funny watching her tap her two legs and arms and count to four...i kid you not....but all were present and correct, pointing in the right directions and she suffered no damage herself apart from some bruising on her foot that she discovered that night.
We picked up the bike.......that's a bit more of a sorry tale I'm afraid......broken fairing, badly scratched piston cover, big scuff in the pannier (It reads Burbia's Bakery now 'cos the d, g and e are gone) and a second broken indicator.
We fixed up the indicator with a splint and a couple of cable ties on either side like we had the last one (that's a different story.....you'll have to ask Lucy
) and looked for Bambi......first off I found its broken antlers...these were proudly mounted over the broken fairing with duct tape and Lucy's going to keep them there as a good luck thing....(have photos will post tommorrow)
The deer was well and truly dead......it had managed to scramble over the low wall alongside the left side of the road and had then fallen about 100 foot down the ravine......I don't know if the fall or the impact of a third of a tonne of GS and Lucy did it, but looking at it from up on the cliff it turned out it was really quite a large beasty.
That's about it......apart from I've got to say what a top top girl Lucy is......after she'd checked herself and we'd picked up the bike, she was asking about the deer in case it was injured.....she was remarkably cool about the whole thing.....way more than i would have been.....and we rode some seriously twisty switchbacks to get to Barcelonette last night and Paul and I had to persuade her that we were stoppping there rather than further North beacause of ther shock she'd had........cool and cucumber don't deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence as Lucy
I have to pick up my car tommorrow and do some stuff so I made a home run from mid-france and BHT and Lucy are just east of Paris.... (blaaaaargh I make it 815 miles today.....i should have sorted out some iron butt witnesses and gone once round to m25 to get a nice certificate!) and will probably be back Late Saturday......be prepared to be very bored with photos though....i took the laptop and downloaded loads of shots every night......i perfected the one hand shooting the camera whilst steering round the twistys technique and there are some good ones.
