Modern Vespa

I've been riding five years and 40k miles on 3 bikes, and have been hit by stange things on the road.

1st thing an Accorn " bird must had dropped it" as no tree in sight
2nd Motorcycle Shifter off friends bike he was riding lead
3rd Big Seagull crap to my jacket,

Not on my list but close call a mattress off the roof of an SUV

So what has hit you? "bug don't count" thats just road protine

Not strange by itself, but by quantity.
About a million bugs while riding down an unlit county highway late at night. It felt like a hailstorm Those little beasties must have been zeroing in on me for miles. I had to stop at a gas station and use one of the squeegees to clean my face shield.
I'm so glad I was wearing a riding jacket.

Close calls:
A thin piece of sheet metal about 3' square making like a frisbee at me at chest/neck level on the road. Luckily, it hit the road before it hit me or anything else. *shudder*

I had a small bird hit me square in the chest at about 45mph (somewhat painful)

He then fell onto my floorboard, I slowed to nearly a stop and he flew away.

a bird (hurt)

a bee (stung)

my favorite: dumpster juice https://modernvespa.com/forum/topic31835?highlight=dumpster

I caught a sparrow to the faceshield once, and a large bug of some sort to the neck, that one bout took me down, left a welt for days.

Dirt Clod.

Bounced out of the back of a Dump Truck. It was pretty large. Luckily it broke into a few pieces when it hit the pavement. One of them bounce up a smacked me in the chest.. left a nice bruise.

While on a morning cruise, warm and sunny, past the orange groves on the 76 out here in So. Cal., I came upon a 74 Cadillac doing the same just up in front of me. All of a sudden the biggest piece of cardboard I had ever seen flew up over the top of that old car, blotting out the sun for what felt like a couple seconds. "Oooooh...an eclipse!" What a graceful arc it took up and over the top of that cruiser on it's kamikaze journey toward me. Like a dear caught in the headlights of this oncoming refuse, I was transfixed... and my tiny little voice said..."wow, that cardboard sure looks shiny."

The few braincells that were awake at the time, pulled my fingers around the brake as hard as those little digits could muster, as I watch that piece of cardboard turn itself into a car hood...and slam itself a couple feet to the right of me as I past, the hood ornament popping off and giving me a tap on my shoulder.

I learned that I can say "shit" twenty times really really really fast.

i have been stung by 3 bees, and once i hit a squirrel. i was going 45mph and i squirrel ran in front of the bike i tried to swerve a little and when i hit it i became airborne. well only a couple of inches but still airborne. my advice though is don't swerve because the chance of dropping the bike becomes much higher.

A golf ball... a wicked slice from a duffer's iron shot.

Yuk!! thats stuff smells

I have sent one out to a car window I am a duffer too.

Years ago I was cycling in Oxford and somebody passing in a car threw a sandwich at me. French stick, too, not just a little triangle.

I guess car's don't count but I did manage to hit myself with my own bike in a crash once - it actually left a tyre mark up my back.

I've done the pigeon thing to - they give you quite a whack but a friend was knocked clean of the back of his bike when a pheasant hit him in the chest.

I once went through a cloud of love bugs riding through the swamp lands of the Mississippi river. Think driving through a plague of locusts but smaller and denser. I thought it was just an unusual dark cloud when I hit it. The creatures don't bite or sting but just stick to you while continuing to crawl about, they were even inside my goggles. The thought of stopping inside the swarm was worse the thought of continuing on through.

Worst thing I was hit by came out of me though. I was feeling very ill and knowing that I was going to be very sick in a very short time. I could see signs for a service station just a few miles ahead and I was going as fast as I could to get there. It was nose to tale traffic at 85mph in the outer lane of the motorway when I suddenly couldn't hold it any longer. It's amazing how fast the vehicles around you sheer away in such a situation!

Dude, I am SO never, ever, riding behind you should we meet at a rally.

I have been hit by many things while on my bicycle, but aside from the rare bit of bug guts on my visor, have been lucky not to have this experience on the Scoots.

I know it doesn't count, but I'm always amazed how painful raindrops are at high speed... like bullets!
Is someone telling me to get a full face helmet?

I murdered a bird with the headlight on an SR50 Factory. Felt pretty bad, but I was riding in the Colorado Chaos Rally and didn't want to swerve and kill riders instead...

I hit two deer while riding a 1977 GS400 Suzuki ( back in 78) broke the headlight, The bike and I stayed up! they both went down, then popped up and sprung off into the woods.

Oh what hit me???
1. a myriad good ideas.
2.some silly tunes from the voices in my head
3. a bird once, (sparrow to the chest, he dropped down from above, bounced off and I swatted him away)
4. 2 stroke exhaust

Years ago while traveling from Nogales to Hermosillo, two bikes, me in front were following a car when all of a sudden I noticed a white ball exit the passenger side window and come straight for me. I quickly swerved and let the full to overflowing Huggies fly by and land on my buddies fairing. EEEEEEEEEEEEEWWWWWWW. What a mess. Never a dull moment south of the border.

A beer can...
whipped at me by two yahoos in a red pickup.

Tinged me in the helmet and I went down. But no real injuries, I did a sausage roll on a grassy median and popped to my feet. Scooter slid about 20 feet against the curb.

It wasn't the beer can that made me go down, it was the rebel yell screamed in my ear as they launched it at me! That made me jerk and the beer can hitting the helmet was the icing on the white trash cake.

It was then I learned to be ready for extremely LOUD NOISES when you ride. That can scare the beejeebies outta ya and make ya twitch!

I got hit by a tarp that came off a truck on the freeway, at about 80mph. It wrapped around the front of my Ducati and myself, and if it wasn't for my gf riding passenger who managed to pull it off, I would have been well and truly hosed.

1. My ex-wife
2. Robert Kirk at the water fountain in elementary school. And I was the one who got in trouble!

What was the question again?

I did that. After I hit a mailbox, too.

Sandro Botticelli, The Birth of Venus.

Belkwinith, that's the coolest avatar I've ever seen...

(sorry for the 'jack...)

In my jeep. Half of the top of a mobile home that flipped off and landed on me in Whitehorse, Canada.

On a bike. Cigarette butt bounced off my visor in Florida.

Just glad it wasn't the other way around.

1. Learned never to pass a street sweeper. Got hit with dirty street juice and I have a 3/4 helmet. Bleh!
2. Live by a rock quarry and have been showered with rocks when they hit a bump in front of me. This is not an odd occasion and I learn to avoid them at all cost. They crack car windshields a lot.
3. This is a new one as of last week: A large truck stopped at a gas station I was at and we were leaving around the same time. I wasn't paying attention when we were leaving and I pull up behind him and it smells delicious... He takes off and bumps a touch out of the station and WHAM! I got hit square in the head with an orange. Gotta love the citrus in the area.

A charging, barking dog. I had to side kick it before it jumped on me!

A rabbit once ran out and hit the rear wheel of my MC. While this was not very lucky for the rabbit, it was extremely lucky for me and the small child I couldn't see riding his "big wheel" in the middle of the road over and past a small rise, as I had slowed down considerably after thumping the poor rabbit and so was able to stop in time without hitting the child! This was when I was touring on a winding but well built up local county highway in the farmlands of NC. The child's parents must've been very lax!

Another time about 10 boxes of various sizes came bouncing and tumbling up a NJ road at me and my 250 Reflex after they'd escaped out of the open side door pf the speeding FedEx delivery van in front of me! I managed to avoid the boxes, even as one big one brushed by at helmet height! But it was a really close thing avoiding the stupid van as the driver stopped short on the road, barely pulling over to the side. I had to swing around him blindly into the opposite lane, where luckily enough there were no vehicles aproaching!

Another time I was attacked by two huge German Shepherds on a back country road (this time in SC) as their very spooked owner screamed at me, "Ride thru, RIDE THRU!!" This I most certainly did as they ran alongside and in front of be, lunging and trying to bite my right thigh and the front wheel! I sped up and managed to escape with both me and the dogs unharmed, but in doing so I had to blow thru an unmarked intersection, and was again lucky that no other vehicles were present there!

Also got hit by a flock of chickens crossing a NJ road (to get to the other side?) Rode right thru them I did, and there were bumps, loud squarks, and flying feathers everywhere, but I didn't go down!

Another time I had just taken off my helmet as I was waiting in line for the Cape May ferry in DE, and a big seagull shat right on my head! -He had to wait until I removed the helmet, right?

Shouldn't complain tho; of all my incidents (and there were plenty in almost 30 years of riding), that one was prolly the most unlucky one!!

Worst is green spit from cagers!! saw one guy spit from car and it hit my visor so i just caught up with him and wiped it on his drivers window!! AHHH hate that

MARSHMALLOWS!!! AND TORTILLAS!!!

How could I forget that if you were riding in the 2009 Doo Dah Parade in Pasadena you got hit with marshmallows and tortillas. People thought it was hilarious until they melted onto our bikes...

Ew.

Yes, and a special bioch to get stuff like that off an exhaust! I had a friend walk into my hot 750 Nighthawk pipe pnce. He said he didn't get burned (which I doubted?), but his melted rubberized track suit smear took me days to get off the exhaust!

Not on the scooter but on a mountain bike I almost hit an ostrich. The birb had escaped and as I came around a bend there it was, chilling on the shoulder of the road. Missed it by about a foot and it was just calm, sitting there.

My new Harley 2007 Streetglide I'm riding on the 73 toll road in Newport Beach and an old truck lost a bag of glass and cans that was awful it was like ten or so bottles I was glad I wore a full face helmet this moves to number 1 on my list. my bike still has all the pits in the paint

1 Glass bottles "How could I forget" when the glass brakes it looks like cloud of glitter on the road
2 Shifter
3 Acorn

Pigeon - it whacked me on the side of me lid. Would have messed me face if I hadn't had a full face on. Took off me helmet at work and a wasp fell out. Not both in the same day

A gnat. It hurt my feelings.

Been hit in the face by bees and wasps and stung in the nuts to boot.

Killed many birds. One cat and a dog with my cage in France but not at the same time.

Once hit a deer in a van.

Line them up.

Bill X

I've had a taste of that! Here's a little story:

The scariest experience I've ever had on my Vespa was on a long roadtrip I took a couple of weeks ago. I had to cross some mountains on a road which connects two towns and had quite a lot of fast moving traffic on it. When I was far up the mountains, there was fog and rain. Not just regular fog...But super thick and damp mountain fog! The kind that when you stick your hand out, your hand vanishes! My helmet is an open face Dainese with a visor. Because of the damp fog, the visor fogged up and blinded me, so I had to keep the visor up and ride this mountain road through the thickest fog I've ever encountered at 60-80 kmph with rain in my face and eyes...Squinting and bawling my eyes out from the wind and rain. I would have stopped...But pulling over or slowing down wasn't an option because there were "safety" rails on either side of the road (the kind that kills bikers if they slide into them) and some wanker in a car behind me might be doing 80 kmph, not see me and hit me.

Eventually I found a big cargo trailer truck driving slowly through the fog and rode behind it through the fog, hoping that someone behind us would see his strong lights before hitting me. I felt like the truck driver had saved my life. He probably had no idea that there was a tiny little vespa hanging on for dear life a meter behind his truck for almost a whole hour.

When I came out of the fog, I pulled over, and my hands were trembling so bad that I almost couldn't pour tea from my thermos. I haven't been so scared for years.

#1: a bee. I promptly zipped up the leather, enclosing him inside! Got stung twice in the chest.

#2: Close call. I was slowing to a stop at an angled intersection & a buck careened around the corner, then leapt onto the sidewalk, narrowly missing me. Notice I said sidewalk, this was in the middle of Olympia's Capitol neighborhood! Our local Puget Sound geography gives the wildlife many wooded ravines to reside in right in town.

+ one near miss in a car: as my brother pulled out from behind a glass truck, it dumped its entire load right into the spot we had just vacated. We would have both been decapitated if my bro wasn't such an impatient cager

A drunk man.

fecker.

A bra. Never did find it's origin though.

Tree limb, fell out of a tree I was going under, fortunately slowly, no damage

Almost got sideswiped by a herd of stampeding cows who were spooked by the rally ride going through their pasture. They were running parallel to the road, but then the field ended on their side so the cows had to cross the road.