Tri-ing in the Holy Land

The ramblings of a struggling triathlete in Israel

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Location: Israel

I'm the mother of 3, a teacher and a couch potato turned triathlete.

Saturday, November 17, 2007

It's dangerous out there...

Yesterday, my friend Gil was hit by a car while out on his bike. The driver was "nice enough" to stop to see if Gil was still alive before fleeing the scene. Gil broke his shoulder and dislocated his thumb. His helmet broke -- I don't even want to think about what would have happened to his head if he hadn't been wearing it.

This morning, I was woken up at 6:23 a.m. (two minutes before my alarm was to go off) by what sounded like a big metal object falling. My husband immediately recognized the sound as that of a car accident, so we ran outside to see what had happened. I left the house, rounded the corner and this is what I saw:


From where I was standing, I couldn't see whether or not the driver was in the car and I assumed that he was, but I quickly discovered that he had already managed to crawl out the window. The driver was a young guy, about 20, who was most likely returning home from a party or something. He wasn't clear on what had happened exactly, but from what we could tell, he hit the parked car pictured below, lost control of his car and flipped over.


Here are a couple more pictures of the flipped-over car:



Amazingly, the driver was uninjured apart from some lacerations on his hand from the broken glass. As we were standing outside looking at the scene of the accident, however, something really scary occurred to me. Our team ride this morning was to the beach in Ashkelon. The meeting time was 6:30, but for various reasons, several of the adult members of the team decided at the last minute to do our own ride in the area and to leave at 7:00. While we were outside, we saw all the kids riding down to the meeting point. That's when I realized that if my 62-year-old teammate, Ilan, who lives one street down from me, hadn't changed his mind about the team ride, he would have been making a left turn out onto the main road (where the accident was) at just about the time that the accident happened. To get a better idea of where he would have been, look at this satellite view (he would have turned right out of his house and then left at the corner, exactly where the parked car was):


It's too scary to consider what might have happened if he'd chosen to ride with the team.

Anyway, we did a short and uneventful (apart from the fog, which we hit a few kilometers up the road) 40 km ride and we all got home safely.

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