Crunch
Well, I hit a car today. This is my first. Do I now have some kind of newfound street cred? I don’t know. Maybe? It was my fault and I’m fine. I probably wouldn’t have hit the guy at all if I had bothered to adjust my brakes properly.
I decided to stop at the Publix on Hammond this evening, and the route I chose was to take Peachtree Dunwoody all the way south from North Springs station. It’s all goes downhill around Abernathy or so, so it’s not a bad ride. There was a lot of traffic on Hammond today, so I started zipping by on the right edge, bypassing cars and riding in blind spots and generally being what people hate about cyclists. Just before Hammond there are two right turns: one into an inn and a wider one into that horrible shopping center where the Publix is. Traffic was completely stopped, I was passing cars on the right about 50 yards north of the Publix turn, and some dude in a compact (Hyundai? I can’t remember) suddenly turned right to get to La Quinta Inn. I couldn’t swerve or brake quite quickly enough, so I ended up hitting the guy’s right rear quarter panel at five or ten mph. It wasn’t exactly graceful—I pulled my feet out of the clips and I think one hand touched the ground—but I was completely unharmed and my first reaction was to just keep going. The guy in the car reacted, however, as one is supposed to react in an accident; he got out in a panic, probably afraid that he ran over my leg or something. I assured him that I was uninjured, I did not need to go the hospital, and I tried to apologize for sneaking up on the right and hitting his car, all the while anxious to just leave the scene and get out of there. One thing that occurred to me afterward, after I calmed down a bit, is that I didn’t get a good luck at the car. I don’t know if I hit hard enough to dent the panel, and I feel like it’s my fault if I did. He gave me his business card, and I left a message for him on La Quinta’s voicemail, where he is apparently an Assistant General Manager. I wonder if he’ll call back.
One thing I did notice about the business card, since I think about inappropriate things, is that, while the guy looked pretty azn, he has a Spanish surname. Neat.