Today, the campground hosted some sort of big Vespa meet-up — there had to be over 100 vespas here, including a ton of older two stroke models. (nothing like the smell of 2 stroke exhaust in the otherwise calm mountain wilderness..)

Being a motorcyclist (albeit one coming off of a three year NYC-induced hiatus), it was interesting to compare the scooter crowd to the biker crowd. While “serious” riders often mock the squids riding their CBSXR1400Ninja++-R in shorts and flip-flops at maximum speed, watching the scooter crowd all day left me with a certain feeling of darwinism-

Here you have a ton of people wearing street clothes, open faced helmets, no protection at all, class-M endorsements not required, riding scooters on twisty mountain roads. While there were a few people in some minimal amount of gear, they were in the minority. I saw one person crash after being unable to negotiate a speed bump (!) and another person who added *training wheels* to a Piaggio MP3 (yes, the one that already has three wheels that you don’t need to balance).

While I certainly don’t begrudge these folks the enjoyment of getting out there on two wheels, doing so in street clothes without proper training is asinine. Apparently some of these scooters can do 80mph! (to be fair, I believe those are 250cc which would require class M endorsement in the state of california..)

Anyway, can anyone explain the use case of scooters in this country? Why not just get a motorcycle? They make sense in european cities, but our cities are not configured to be scooter friendly. Even NYC is a nightmare for two wheeled vehicles.

Anyway, in other news, the truck is still broken, and my current plan is to ship it back east, rent a car, and head back to PA for some vacation time. A major repair will be easier back there anyway. I guess that means the “on the road” counter on the right side of the page has to be reset. Sad.

Posted in: Randomness