I’ve calmed down a little bit, but yesterday evening I was ready and oh-so willing to find the frickin’ idiot road commissioner that signed off on chip sealing roads around Hemlock … and drag that asshat face down over the entire length of all the chip sealed roads.
Chip Sealing is a method they use around here to make roads worthless for a time. They put down a layer of tar or heavy oil, and then they cover the road with crushed rock. Loose crushed rock. To a healthy depth. Well, not healthy for motorcyclists, of course.
Once the road is turned to shit by pouring all that loose rock on it, traffic is supposed to slow down, and to gradually force the rocks into the tar, with the surplus being blown to the side of the road to lay in the ditch … or to just generally be dangerous by forming deep gravel strips on the side of the road. They call that “paved” around here.
Really, really frickin’ annoying and dangerous.
I encountered such roads last night, laid out in such a way that I was basically trapped – no choice but to continue on until I found a cross road to get me to one that wasn’t such “fun” to ride. And every frickin’ cross road that I came too was also chip sealed. The inside of my helmet has no paint left as the profanity seared it off. You can’t imagine how much fun I was having riding a $30,000 bike on crap like that and praying that I didn’t encounter any traffic … since the average cage driver around here doesn’t pay attention to the 35 mph signs nor worry about how much of that fine gravel they spray around. And listening to the gravel beating the inside of the fenders, the underside of the bike … and probably the radiator shroud as well … I haven’t had the nerve to look yet as I’m afraid that I would go beat some shitheads face off …
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