Well, once again my work schedule works out that I get to do another Chattanooga rally. This year, my schedule will have me in Chattanooga the entire week leading up to AmeriVespa, so I think I'll stay on for the rally. Should be interesting.
Since I am riding up Monday though, I'm thinking about taking the long way and spending the day in the mountains. Should be fun, and now, I'll be spending the rest of the weeks lunches planning routes on google maps :-).
Alright, in a moment of serious hardcore WTF! this cyclist (and his many commenters) prove conclusively that they really don't get it :-). You see, I too am a cyclist, I've ridden both road and mountain bikes for the better part of the last 20 years. I've probably got more seat time on a bike than a scooter or motorcycle, and while some of what he says is true, he fails to see the same problems coming from his own brethren. The folks pulling 20 year old bikes out of storage to 'ride to work' for the same reasons many are adopting scooters.
Perspective is a bitch, and I personally wish people like this gentleman would buy some. Then again, I don't live in NYC. I live in suburban Atlanta. One of my chosen activities is to walk, run or rollerblade the 'greenbelt' in a nearby creek basin. This is a 12 foot wide concrete trail through the wetlands / floodplain next to a creek that runs through the heart of the business and shopping district of the area. It is a great place to skate and walk, if it weren't for all the inconsiderate cyclists that are busy rolling at 20-30mph in full gear riding like they are training for the Tour de France or Giro d'Italia. I've watched 2 of them take out children on training wheels because they were traveling too fast and couldn't avoid the situations. I've had 2 others throw water bottles or trash at me because I intentionally blocked the path to force them to slow down. But hey, they are down here because it's safer for them than mixing with the cars on the road.
BTW, I am neither a Mod or a Rocker, I'm just a guy that rides a scooter, all of the other slang crap this guys throws out there describing the scooter owners just rolls off, it's all been said before. But as a fellow cyclist, this bonehead is the reason cyclists are viewed so dimly by so many drivers. Many of whom are terrified of passing a cyclist on the roads.
Alright so last week I took a vacation. For the first time ever, I decided to take my scooter along on a vacation, so I would have some flexibility if work cropped up and the family could stay. Turns out, I didn't need that flexibility but it was fun to have the scooter. We have close friends in Destin, FL (they own a great little toy store in the Destin Commons), so we went there to visit them and some of the best beaches in the world.
Leaving early on Monday, I rode the BV500 with my wife in the car with the kids trailing along. We left about 6am, and the weather was just perfect for a ride. I could have easily made it in just 3 stops, but we had a couple of extras in there for kids potty breaks. The first leg, from Alpharetta to breakfast at Chic-Fil-A in Columbus was almost entirely super slab. The BV handled that marvelously, cruising at an indicated 80mph most of the way, which worked out to 73mph on the GPS (in the car). Filled the tank (58mpg), and prepped for the second leg, Columbus to the south side of Dothan, AL for a gas and potty stop. This stretch is mostly 4 lane roads, with sections, particularly from Phenix City to Eufala of 2 lane. Speed limits are 45-60, so it is still a fast stretch of road. Again the BV handled great, but at the end of this leg I was running into a problem. The pants & seat had seams that where working against each other to try and chafe, so I pulled a towel I carry from under the seat to add a layer. This seemed to solve the issue. Next up was the final leg. From I-10 down to US 98 is one of those dangerous roads where the speed limit jumps around alot, and in some cases will go from 60 to 55 to 45 to 35 in the space of a mile as you go through one of the old little towns, so it is a slower ride, but that's alright because it is also quite scenic. We arrived safe and sound in Destin at about 1:30.
The rest of the week was all playtime, with a little bit of beach laziness, a little bit of snorkeling, a bit of shopping, some more beach bumming, some putt putt and go-karts, a few fun little rides around Destin and out to Sea Side and over to Pensacola to try and find the meetup of the P'cola riders before heading home on Sunday.
We did manage to catch Wall-E on Friday, great movie, good fun, even the 2 year old loved it.
Sunday was the ride home, and it was WET. The day started at 10AM and it was drizzling in Destin, and while it never really came down too hard on me early, the stretch from Eufala to Columbus was about as wet as it could have been. The BV handled it gracefully, but in the future, I will stop and put the rain gear on BEFORE it starts raining. By the time we got north of Columbus though, the rain had cleared off, and by Newnan, it was time to remove the rain gear. From there, it was on home, and the only real problem of the trip. At the tail end of the ride, the BV started to sputter and lose power when starting from idle. I suspect bad gas or a plug is at fault, so I will be working on the this week, but it seemed to run fine last night, so perhaps it was just vapor lock or moisture in the fuel system. I'll talk to Floyd about it Saturday.
Anyways, it's good to be home, but the ride was wonderful. I think I'll be taking the scooter on many vacations to come.
Yeah, I know, it has been a a quiet couple of weeks. For me, it has been a tough couple of weeks. Because it is the summer, the kids schedules have dictated that I ride to work less, because 3-4 mornings a week, I have one of the kids with me on the way to work. At this point, they won't ride. Partly for a lack of proper gear, I'm having a tough time finding a mesh jacket small enough for my 85lb daughter, but also in part because she's very nervous about the act of riding. This is fine, but it hinders my riding.
Fortunately, I still get a couple of days a week, plus on the weekends I'm doing a couple of days a month at one of the local shops as a 'filler'. Sometimes I'm prepping bikes, loading them or selling them. No matter what, one thing is for certain. It is BUSY right now. The dealer sells both Vespa and the Genuine products, and to say that the Buddy is hot would be a gross understatement. Just wow.
Anyways, if you haven't been keeping up, I recently started a major rework of Two Wheel Junction, and will soon be adding some new features there, and that is absorbing quite a bit of time as well. I hope everyone doesn't mind, but as I work those changes, I'll be posting some of the details here.
So last year I signed up to be a Smart owner. Friday, I picked up my very own Smart forTwo. No, this is not a purely practical purchase. There is a fair amount of 'want' involved. It suits my personality, I like being different, and the Smart is most certainly 'different'. So here we are, Sunday, and I'm finally posting about this :-). The Smart has almost 500 fresh miles on it. I have a nephew graduating from high school today, so I decided to make a slow and gentle dash up to Nashville. By way of the 'old' roads and some scenic routes. My oldest daughter, who wants this to be hers in another 3 years, rode with me as we cruised 260 miles in about 8 hours of just playful cruising. Stopping whenever the whim struck, for pictures, apples, or even just a chance to be silly. In short, a perfect day of life that we seized for ourselves. no worries, no cares, just a fun day.
My daughter won't ride the scooter with me, but this we could do, and so we did. So in addition to the other reasons I made the purchase.I now have to add, 'priceless and irreplaceable days of fun with my children'. Some Pictures are over in the Photo Albums. Sorry it isn't scooter related, but it is kind of my 4 wheel scooter (and it shares the same garage bay as the BV and People, if I ever put it back in the garage.
Next to the house on the farm where the rally was held was a truly gorgeous Azalea bush, probably 6 feet tall and fully 8 feet wide, it was covered in blooms. This image was shot with my Panasonic Lumix.
Uh, well, oops?!?!
So well, I broke it. It being everything. You see the weekend before last, I left town to go camping at a scooter rally (Joe Mama's Rally, the Atlanta based Terminal Scooter Clubs first rally). This meant 3 days away from the laptop (good thing). Unfortunately, upon my return, it wouldn't boot. A little diagnosis, and it turns out that the hard drive had failed. This isn't the first time that disk has failed, both times prior it had failed, it had done so at about the same percentage of full. Strange, but so be it. So I wiped the disk and prepared to restore from my backup, which I am religious about, I use both a Time Machine backup for hourly and daily, with a twice weekly Backup for a network attached disk array.
Unfortunately, the Maxtor external HD that I use for the Time Machine backup decided to ALSO fail, apparently it had issues prior, but they didn't show up when the drive sat on the shelf over my desk, but when I moved it (it was not dropped and it was powered off and unplugged), it broke something, because the drive is now unreadable. So I had to fall back to the network attached storage restore. It took nearly 3 days to recover the data onto a hard disk, but further analysis of the laptop proved that it needed a new hard disk, so Friday, it went winging off to Apple for a new hard disk.
Fortunately, I have a couple of other machines to fall back to, but I do appear to have lost a large chunk of my pictures, and a small set of my documents. Fortunately, it doesn't appear that anything truly critical is gone.
I did however take the opportunity to clean some things up. One of those things was to rearrange some things here on the blog. I've archived the old posts by year, and started bringing some of the old posts from the .mac blog over here into the archives. The downside, I may have broken the old comments, and I can almost promise that the RSS Feeds are going to show new things that aren't new.
Sorry bout that.
On the upside, the Rally was phenomenal with the sole exception of one of the vintage bikes soft seizing at 40+ mph on the ride out. Faith, who had never dealt with a seize before forgot to grab the clutch in her panic, but she kept the bike upright for nearly 100 feet before it finally bucked her. She's alright, a few bumps and bruises, but nothing broken, and the bike is very repairable. She even stayed for the rally after a quick trip to the hospital for a good check out.
In addition the weather is perking up, and the entire area is abuzz with bikes on the roads, including a very large number of new riders. How bad is the new rider situation? Apparently the MSF classes are filling so fast that they are booked within days of being posted as available. I've talked to 3 new riders that are struggling to get the class scheduled :(.
Man, what a week. Work is insane right now, and to make matters worse, I've got more side work than I can handle right now. Isn't that how it always happens though? I had a couple of months where I was working to get jobs and they just wouldn't come, and then all of the sudden everyone comes back at the same time and needs it right now. Oh well, better take it while I can, I need to feed the toy habit somehow.
It's during weeks like these that I have really come to appreciate the value in the ride. When you sit down and look at the cost / value of owning and commuting on a motorcycle or a scooter, the raw dollars don't actually work out to be a huge savings (unless you commit to it completely and sell the car). The fringe benefits can really eclipse the economic factors.
What I'm talking about is the personality altering 20-40 minutes in the saddle between a hectic and soul-crushing day at the office and arriving at home. We are talking about a bio-chemical reaction to being outside and feeling the wind in our faces. It's like being a kid again, riding a bicycle fast down a hill, it's an almost giddy feeling that seems to touch something deep in the historical genetic makeup. I hear it from other riders in various forms, but so many of them just take advantage of it on the weekends and on pretty days.
Taking advantage of this during the week probably saves me thousands on therapy and drugs.
So why the sudden interest in costs? Well as a post on today's 2 Stroke Buzz, Beeb makes an interesting point about recent articles. Specifically the 5 this month about the Buddy getting 100mpg. Beeb questions that the Buddy 125/150 gets 100mpg. I don't know, but I suspect that in some places around the country, and some riders, the answer is yes, it can.
You see, for the past 3 months, I've been tracking my own mileage in each of my scooters using a handy dandy little iPhone app I'm playing at writing (which started as a webapp, but I'm now taking native).
Let's start with me. I am 6'3" and weigh in at roughly 230lbs. I generally have about 10lbs of extras with me, in my laptop bag and obscenely heavy riding jacket(which I love in the winter and put away once temps hit 75+). Then let's talk about where I live and ride. I am in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, living on the southside of Cumming. Between home, work, and the area where I do my shopping, there are hills and climbs. As best as I can tell, the distance between the lowest point and the highest point is about 182 vertical feet. Most of my riding is in this area. All of the roads are 45-55 mph speed limits, and the longest stretch of road without a stop is 6.5 miles, the shortest is about 80 feet.
My primary ride is of course the BV500. In the 3 month period, I have filled it 9 times. I think the numbers are a little skewed here, simply because this is the bike I take on longer rides, up into the mountains or down into Atlanta, but I'm putting an average of 2.19 gallons of gas per fill up, and getting an average of 66 mpg. Bear in mind, with a 463cc engine, I'm not exactly running WoT, nor am I doing the 'full throttle launch' under normal circumstances. In general, I ride pretty casually and work more on a smooth constant throttle line on the roads than getting from A to B the fastest. I suspect that more open road would increase that to above 70mpg which is what I got on the Chattanooga trip last summer.
The backup is my People 250 that I recently turned over to my brother to get him addicted. It got 6 tanks of gas in 3 months, and with less power I tended to ride it a little harder, but still rarely at WoT. The only non-commuting ride this bike took in the period was a 115 mile trek into Atlanta to get a seat latch repaired, and a meandering wander back home through some areas of the city I don't get to very often. I have always suspected that in the performance/price curve of the three scooters, that the People was the most efficient and these totals bear me out. The average on the People works out to 78.5mpg, and with a couple of tweaks, I suspect would be even better. The last 2 fill ups indicated 83 and 84 mpg, verus mid 70's it was getting prior. The difference was that until then, the People had Givi E470 top case on it.
The Chinese 150 (Shanghai JMStar 'Jonway' 150t) with it's crappy brakes and GY6 based engine has had just 4 fill ups in that time, because I don't honestly ride it that much, and when I do, it's usually getting flogged, for most things, it just isn't my first choice. So what kind of milage am I getting on it? over the 4 fill ups, only 3 of which are valid for measurement since the first one was to establish the baseline on the tank, I averaged 88mpg.
So after that wall of words, if I'm getting 88mpg out of a crappy 150 in hilly areas, with my 240lbs of rider and stuff, could the better built and arguably more efficient Buddy get 100mpg? I think the answer is yes, but not everywhere, and not for everyone. In flat areas, like southern Florida or much of the coastline on the eastern seaboard, with a 120lb rider that isn't running WoT everywhere, I think 100mpg is a very real possibility, but averages around the country are probably more likely around the 85-90 mark.
Hey, Maybe Genuine would like to donate one for me to 'test' my theories on, maybe two, since the Stella needs to be tested too right? I hear Red is the fastest color, so perhaps an Italia Buddy and a Red Stella? Oh well, a guy can dream can't he.
Although, if my brother buys the People, I see a Stella in the garage anyways :-)
Wind was the order of the day for yesterday. My brother and his wife spent much of last week painting their oldest daughter's room. Sunday, they asked if I would come up and help hang a chair rail around the room. Sounded like a good excuse to get out of the house, so off I went. An hour later, the chair rail was hung, and I was free to play, so I did. I left my brother's house and decided to head up to Lake Lanier just to see how bad the lake still is. It is bad, real bad. Normally the lake should be at 'full pool' about this time of year. Instead, it remains 10-12 feet down, and the sight of so much exposed shoreline and prime fish nesting ground is quite depressing. At the same time, this time of year brings out the wild azaleas and dogwood trees that are two of my very favorite sights in the Atlanta springtime (usually seen through red itching eyes from the spring allergies), and I did find one nice example overlooking the water. Needless to say I enjoyed the ride, but it presented some interesting (to say the least) challenges. You see, Friday it was 82 degrees. Sunday, it was 52 with 30+ mph winds. Riding across the Buford Dam with a 300 foot valley to the left and one of the largest man made recreational lakes in the world to the right, well, it was a challenge. Fortunately, the BV was more than up to the challenge. I will say that the most nerve racking parts of riding in gusty wind conditions aren't the straight aways with the crosswinds, it is the turns when a blast of wind hits from the inside of the turn, when the whole bike feels like it 'lifts' a couple of inches before settling back down into place. Keeping a steady pace and a wary eye on the lines in and out of turns just becomes that much more critical. Funny thing though. All the sport bike guys I ride with talk about wearing off the "chicken strips". Before I changed tires, they kept trying to tell me that scooter tires don't come with them, they didn't see the tires new. Now they have, but my "chicken strips" don't seem to survive a single trip to the mountains and I'm afraid that the sides of my front tire are wearing faster than the middle. From there, I headed off the lake up into the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, running out GA-20 to GA-372 up into the Big Canoe/Bent Tree area before coming back home. All in all, 140 miles, a little business, a little pleasure and by the time I got home, I was in such a great mood. No more stress, just relaxed, and ready to chill on the sofa to watch August Rush with the family. Sometimes, you can enjoy the ride even more in adverse conditions than in ideal.
Yesterday Steve Williams of Scooter in the Sticks fame announced that he was going to start upon a new journey, and that his posts on Scooter in the Sticks would slow down. For many, including myself, this is a sad day. Steve is a rare man who has the talent of both the visual and the word ( whereas I have neither, but since I also lack the shame gene, I do both anyways :) ). His contributions to the online scooter community through his art have had a great impact, and he will be missed. I personally have high hopes that he'll be back after a short break, but only time will tell. Until then, Steve I will miss your art and words, you have been a daily read for me for 2 years now. Unfortunately, I suspect that some of his new direction came as a result offrustrations with an upgrade on his blog which cost him some lost data, and more then likely, quite a bit of frustration. I can relate. When I first started blogging about my scooter adventures, I made a choice to not use one of the commercial blogging systems and to post my own using a desktop blogging software. This decision came after poking and researching all the options. Blogger was the obvious easy one, but there was also the option of doing a privately hosted site using WordPress or Blojsom. The problem with all of the above is that I prefer to edit offline, and doing so in those environments meant a text editor, or a product like MarsEdit (which I now use for another site that I maintain for work, for anyone with a Mac and an online editable (WordPress, TypePad, Plosjom, Blogger etc. blog, I suggest that you run over and give Daniel a bit of money, the product is really that good and I won't say that all that often). At the time, I was already writing a personal blog on my .mac account using Apple's kinda of funky, but more or less usable iWeb product. You can still see those posts here. Then in July, I decided to split my then all encompassing single blog space out into three seperate logs, as they related to what I do (and it is actually now five, as I've had to add one for my day job, and my personal one is back up too). Anyways, when I made that change, I also changed software. These days, I use a Mc based program called SandVox. It keeps everything in a single local file and publishes to the web when I'm happy with it. When used with backup software, this means that I have been through 4 computers since I started blogging with this software, and never had a blip of data loss. It also means that I can rework the entire visual aspects without ever impacting the content. Unfortunately, once committed to one or the other, moving from one to another becomes very difficult, so while I've been lucky to find a system that works for me, it isn't a good answer for everyone. But then again, understanding that last line is part and parcel to understanding the choices involved in riding. Commuting on a scooter works for me, but for a couple of the guys that I work with, a scooter would cripple their manliness, so they have to ride 1000cc bikes with no storage. That works for them, and the scooter works for me. In the end, we all get where we need to be.
Alright, so I'll be the first to admit that I really didn't like the old look of the site, so I decided to rearrange and rework. This is the result. Hope you like it, obviously I've tried to simplify things a bit. As I mentioned in my last post, my brother was buying my People 250. I had just taken taken it up and parked it in his garage so he could get a feel for it, but this last weekend he asked if I would give him a little bit of 'getting started'. While I said yes, I'll be totally honest. I've spent most of the past 2 years learning about how much I don't know. The idea of teaching someone else. Well, it intimidates me, because of what I know I don't know. So part one of my visit was to get his MSF class booked. That took no time, so part two was the take it easy, ride along around the neighborhood, just to get comfortable with the bike, the throttle, starting and stopping. Blinkers, turns, brakes and throttle, oh my. We spent a little over an hour just riding through his neighborhood, with frequent stops for Q&A sessions. These proved to be interesting, because I found myself frequently mentally referring to my three strongest education influences, the MSF course, Proficient Motorcycling, and the Musings of an Intrepid Commuter to put into words the practices of what the body learns through repetition. The one thing that kept coming home to me was that there is no substitute for seat time. No amount of reading, watching and dreaming can replace the real seat time. So after over an hour of neighborhood, low speed practice, he felt he was ready to tackle a little more. So we tackled something a little more adventurous, his daily commute to the office. Figuring that these are the roads he will have to ride to supplement his car, these should be the first roads to get comfortable with. Again, taking it in sections with frequent stops, we traversed the 10 mile commute to his office. It was a good chance to really get out and get a feel for what he was signing on for. After the ride down, I could visibly see the confidence growing, but with it, an awareness of how different riding is in reality to the imagined experience. After talking about some of the things from the ride down, it was time to head home. Because of traffic patterns in the area, he uses a different route home, so we headed out that different route, and during the ride, I got to see first hand the improvement in his confidence from the first half of the ride to the second half. It took a little over an hour to make the round trip loop with all of our stop and talk breaks, but at the end, I think he has the confidence to make the trip safely, but not the overconfidence that causes issues. In the end though, he is very excited to go take the MSF course, as that remains the single best resource for new riders, and yes, at the end of the day, he had the same ear to ear grin that all riders know. The thrill of the ride.
