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Tuesday Dec. 21 - Today was our first riding day. We rode about 40 km on the highway "Autopista" towards Matanzas. We then turned off on a smaller road where Pedro warned us there was alot of downhill and not to go to fast. Before we knew it we were going 50 km / hour. Bob dropped his hat and I slowed down to pick it up for him. The next thing I knew I heard an explosion and 5 seconds later I was down. The fall could have been alot worse. I got road burn on both knees, elbows and my left thumb. The thumb was the worst. My front rim had huge gouges in it. Nyirka, Pedro's wife and a neurologist did an excellent job patching me up in the truck. Thank God for the truck which bought me safely the last 10 km to Matanzas. At one point my pants had to be removed to bandage my knees and Nyirka said to Claudia, her 5 year old daughter, and Anna, David Mozer's 4 year old dauther, the 2 little girls riding in the truck, don't look, and of course they did. Pedro got quite a kick out of this story the next day. At night we discovered a sink was leaking and creating a little river in our room. Bob my roommate and bike buddy patched the pipe with duct tape so we could safely make it through the night. So this was the end of quite a stressful day for me. Emily, the cyclist from the east village in New York lent me her emery board to file my rim smooth again. This took an hour and a half. I also used my leathermen which my company WRQ gave me for filing too.
