The Ideal Commuter

In 2005 or thereabouts my wife got her motorcycle endorsement and conceived a notion that she wanted to ride a Vespa around Key West as part of her job visiting recalcitrant students. We found an almost brand new ET4 150cc automatic with 236 miles and a couple of slight bumps on the leg shield where the first owner apparently dropped the scooter not even causing the paint to chip but enough that she lost her nerve. $3500 got us a scooter complete with accessories and little did we know many years of faultless service ahead.

In 2007 I bought a Vespa 250, a lovely machine that was part of a batch with faulty electrics and cheap fuel pumps from China and that I had to sell to save my sanity. In ten months it spent more time in the shop under warranty that it did on the road and I still put ten thousand miles on it I liked it so much.

I replaced it with my Triumph Bonneville motorcycle still running faultlessly after a decade and 98,000 miles. My Vespa itch which I have had all my life since my first 50cc in 1970 had to be satisfied and I bought a 200cc two stroke. The idea was it would commute at 60mph and being almost maintenance free and carry a spare tire with split rims such that I could replace tires at home easily. Simple solid and reliable.

It took me five years to come to terms with the fact that it was slower and less reliable than I could stand and miraculously I got rid of it in a trade with a  bright orange Vespa S150, a 2008 scooter with 326 miles on the clock and like brand new .

I didn't really need it as I have been using my wife's ET4 consistently over the past 13 years but I love the color and the style of the S150 and it has the same motor, a simple air cooled two valve motor with the addition of a fuel pump for some reason. I figured it would be as rock solid as the ET4 and five thousand miles later it has proven to be just that.

I find myself always picking one of the Vespas over the 865cc Bonneville for my commutes these days. Thy are light comfortable and easy to ride. They don't have a clutch which relieves my arthritic left wrist and they will hold a true 60mph on Highway One on the flat in neutral wind conditions, easily enough to keep up with traffic. And not so powerful to tempt me to speed or pass even at speed, or risk getting a  ticket.

I like having two rides so when one is in the shop getting new tires or in the case of the ET4  new exhaust muffler, suspension and carburetor I have a back up to commute. Tires wear out fast on these ten and eleven inch rims so I can spread changes a bit further apart by riding one then the other. I tend to favor the ET4 which with about 30,000 miles on the clock has a looser and slightly more powerful engine. It holds sixty actual miles an hour even into headwinds where the newer S150 loses a few mph...

For some reason it has taken me a while to come to terms with the ET4's  funky aesthetics and the lack of a gearbox but when I think back over the years it has been exactly what I wanted ina  Vespa, reliable, fast enough and easy to ride and I have overlooked it because I am an idiot. On top of all that though the paint shows signs of aging around the edges it looks amazingly fresh and new even exposed all it's life to the corrosive Keys atmosphere. Indeed nowadays with disc brakes front and back, water cooled four valve engines with braking systems the old ET4 has itself become a classic, the first of the four stroke automatics first designed twenty years ago. I have earned to chish my alabaster classic and am happy I still own it.

I'm not sure where all this leaves the Bonneville my workhorse of the past decade. Cheyenne was happy to stay home the last years of her life, car trips wore her out so I was free to take off on two wheels. Young Rusty by contrast is ready to go anywhere with me anytime. To take off on two wheels is to betray him, besides it is much more fun arriving somewhere with an eager brown dog in two than by myself on two wheels. This is a truth I cannot deny so mist of my riding now is between Key West commuting and shopping and Marathon to meet my wife at her job. The Vespas handle that just fine and when Rusty sees me put my helmet on he knows its a trip without him (and therefore no fun AT ALL). I miss my 1979 two stroke P200:

I turn sixty on Halloween so I suppose change needs to be acknowledged. Long trips by Bonneville are suspended for now...

And I do acknowledge that I am changing at least for now. I don't anticipate a future of not riding and in retirement I foresee a lot more touring and traveling and day trips and so forth. Rusty will be older and I will live in a  place where a day trip by motorcycle will be satisfying and get me home in time for a romp with my older buddy.

But for now my sweet spot is a Vespa 150, air cooled and old fashioned but modern at 60 mpg and 70 mpg, thus surprising the commuters in big slow trucks and distracted drivers of sedans suddenly passed by a hairy old hobbit on a moped on the Overseas Highway.

I feel no rush to make myself youthful with 800 pounds of loud heavy awkward motorcycle.

and my Italian adventures remind me I don't need 170 horse power every day.

Weird I know but I am happy at the moment with 12 horse power...

Short Lived Vespa

I rode my restored Vespa to get a haircut in Big Pine Key and the scooter ran better than I have ever seen it run. It was strong and full of acceleration. Exciting!

I rode into Key West later in the day and the motor went ping! and seized solid. I was doing fifty miles an hour at the time coming in to Stock Island. I coasted to a stop and called a cab to get me to my destination.

I walked the last part to my destination and passed a few things of interest.

I was already missing my 1979 scooter so this 100cc four speed Pagsta looked pretty good, even half undressed like that:

Some people like their women paid for an undressed and this form of mobile advertising for the strip club on Duval Street annoys some people in town. They used to park where the cruise ship tourists came ashore blocking parking for other businesses and they caused outrage. 

You can rent naked women to dance with you (no sex please we are a no prostitution state which surprises some tourists in this place) or ou could spent far less money and rent wheels to get around town. Brightly colored wheels too:

Walking Rusty at Truman Waterfront we saw increasingly frenzied signs of construction:

But some things never change, at least not yet:

I drove the broken Vespa back to the shop, a 17 hour round trip. The mechanic was apologetic and promised a repair better than ever and likely to last longer than 25 miles. I feel jinxed by this Vespa.

I am ever the optimist. This time it will work. Guaranteed.

Old Vespa. New Tricks

After a weekend spent in Miami dealing with the Great Exploding Egg Fiasco and sundry other amusements my wife went home Sunday afternoon to gird her loins for the teaching salt mines. Me being a shift worker was off till Tuesday night so I drove, as you do, to St Petersburg. Rusty came with me, it goes without saying. 

I have the best dog in the world (now that Cheyenne has gone to her reward) and he rode across the Sunshine State curled up in a ball on the back seat that used to barely accommodate my Labrador. There was room for three Rustys. We crossed the Sunshine Skyway Bridge, always spectacular:

And stopped in the same place alongside the causeway where Cheyenne took a few rather splendid pictures in the past. 

I was not only hauling my dog and good self to St Petersburg, I was on a mission to deliver my new/old Vespa to the shop for one more go at  making a permanent fix to some running problems. I have a lot of experience with this rig and it works quite well:

The Vespa ran 5,000 rather uncertain miles with a couple of seizures. The last set me back and I couldn't figure what was wrong. I was stumped. Then I found out the former Sarasota dealer had set himself up as Vespa Servicing of Bradenton. He did a great job with my wife's modern Vespa after I lost faith in Vespa Miami and Jiri was falling out with his flakey partner on Stock Island at their former motorcycle shop. I was delighted to discover Darren could be the solution to my current Vespa problems as he loves vintage Vespas. Jiri hates two strokes and says if he worked on this scooter it would end up compromising our friendship!

Rusty had a grand time as always and he kept close enough I could let him trot around and work off some energy before we settled in for the night at yet another dog friendly La Quinta.

It was a pleasant interlude, under overcast skies and slightly muggy. Temperatures don't seem to bother Rusty at all despite his thick fur.

Next morning found us at Vespa Servicing, Darren's place a couple of miles inland from I-75 in Bradenton half an hour south from St Petersburg. Darren operates out of his home with a full workshop downstairs and a mobile van to service Vespas at people's homes. I wish I had someone who would come out to the house, change the oil and the belt and the tires and bugger off again. He says he has picked up most of his clients from his former life as a dealer, and I'm not surprised.

He gave me a coffee (it was eight o'cock in the morning) and I intended to high tail it out of there to be on Duval Street for an appointment at 4:30. Instead we got to talking and I was enjoying myself. He grew up in England like me but we talked of his dealership and how he got discouraged after the fiasco of 2008 and the difficulties of working with Piaggio who owns Vespa. Rusty was fascinated.

 Darren's own GS on the bench.

And a whole bunch of lost causes looking to return to the road. These old scooters need to be preserved because they aren't making these any more. Even the Indian Vespa lookalikes are now four stroke automatics even if they look very similar. 

Darren's home away from home. I rather envied him his wheels and the sound of six months exploring Colorado sounded good to me. But I'm glad he's back and working on Vespas. I'm pissed I need his help, the previous epic restore was supposed to end these capers, but I am hoping he can finish in proper style that which I started elsewhere, with the renovation of my long suffering Vespa. The work has begun.

The plan is to slightly modify the existing engine for more power without sacrificing the integrity of the design. Hopefully that will help me keep up with traffic on Highway One and I trust Darren can tune it properly which is beyond me. My wife kindly agreed to let me try this last experiment and if I remembered how to  genuflect I'd be praying this experiment works. The full power boost to 220cc was going to cost three grand roughly so that was deemed too much and I think Darren has found a good compromise for me. Slight power boost, better reliability at better than half the cost. Cool. 

 Back home we drove, arriving in 6 hours with a sleepy but perfectly composed little dog sleeping on the back seat. It was good to be back and I made my appointment with 45 minutes to spare. Keys Disease is a foreign concept for me.

 Rusty's reward was a serene mangrove walk until he was exhausted.

Home sweet home.

Everglades Vespa: End of the Adventure

Heading home from Big Cypress i started by heading east on Duff Bridge dirt road cutting through the countryside toward Highway 27. Behind me it looked like cane clearing season might have begun.

 Sugar cane is a dire crop and Big Sugar offered to sell much of its vast holdings to the state for land reclamation and restoration. The Republican State Legislature and Governor rejected the offer in their usual short-sighted manner. Sugar cane sucks the nutrients out of the soil so completely it takes huge amounts of phosphate fertilizer to keep the crops growing each year. The phosphates leach through the soil into Florida Bay and contribute to wrecking the ocean environment including the coral reef in the Keys. Brilliant stuff. Plus you have to burn off the new crops to clear the fields for harvest thus killing vast swathes of terrified wildlife. Modern techno-agriculture is a nightmare.

I love these wide open spaces, silent but for the wind whistling in your ears.  People always nag on about alligators in South Florida as though they are as common and as lethal as deep snowdrifts in Michigan in winter. In point of fact- not true. I saw maybe one shy alligator head in a canal all day and one whopper I did see at the Seminole museum scuttled off like a cockroach surprised by a sunlamp,  running madly away from my Vespa and throwing itself into a pond and out of sight before my iPhone left my pocket. Terrifying indeed, but keep spreading the rumors to keep people away. Florida is almost as deadly as Australia when it comes to wildlife. Ho Hum.

Evidence that rainy season hasn't yet kicked in, which is why insects were not present and I got not one bite from anything all day.

I looked these guys up on my phone. In some manner not explicable to me they were driving towards each other on the track in their SUVs one night around 9:30 pm and they hit each other head on. Talk about bad luck or bad timing or something. The road is dead straight for miles.

I saw no turtles or alligators or anything much. A few cormorants sunning themselves, a couple of deer which surprised me as they could have been exported from the Florida Keys, and a bunch of turkey vultures. A bunch of vultures flying in circle is known as a "kettle" I am reliably informed. This was a solitary specimen not scared of me:

I got back on the Highway 27  superhighway, dodging trucks which passed me at 65 while I was bimbling into a headwind at 53  miles per hour. At the occasional traffic light I would pull ahead of the 18-wheelers and they would slowly catch me up again and pass. Eventually we turned onto Krome Avenue where I pulled over to let faster vehicles pass. That's where I saw this, a reminder to stay observant.

 I was back in the miles and miles of one lane roadway and I had to pull over a few times until I got snug behind a 50 mile per hour truck and a small retinue of vehicles stuck behind him. This no passing rule is insane on Krome Avenue. The sooner they bring in self driving cars the better for all of us. They should be easier to pass when riding a motorcycle as the car won't take it personally if you pass it.

 Further down Krome I was back in the land of stopping and starting. Plus the traffic is painfully slow. I stopped for a break next to this radar sign. Check it out no one was even close to exceeding the modest speed limit! Notice the long straight roadway!

 In Homestead I stopped to photograph this other piece of Florida DOT madness. These signs have cropped up in Key West on North Roosevelt prompting the belief that the Department of Transportation is trying to encourage cyclists to commit  suicide. Here in Homestead this madness is being promote on a single lane main street. Florida already allows cyclists to ride on sidewalks, yielding to pedestrians. The need for these signs is not apparent to me.

 On my way through town at seven o'clock Friday morning I noticed this restaurant. On my return at 3 in the afternoon I stopped to buy dinner, brown stew chicken and curried goat with a beef patty for appetizer. Twenty bucks, a cheerful smile and I was on my way. Two hours to home.

My mistake was not taking Card Sound Road and instead mixing it up with streaming traffic rushing to a getaway in the Keys on a Friday afternoon. I still am not sure what happened but the Vespa seized and I had to cool off and restart a couple of times to get onto Key Largo.  I haven't yet stripped the engine to figure out what's up but at the moment I have other priorities for time and money so the old Vespa can have a rest for a while as I get my business up and running. I was surprised because the scooter has been running well for more than 4,000 miles and I have had it up to full speed without any worries on my commutes.  This file photo from my archives shows how intense traffic can be, and was on Friday afternoon. I should eased up instead of trying to keep up and keep out of the way. The shoulder was the right place to ride. Oh well a learning experience!

 

I called my good natured wife who dropped everything and drive 90 minutes to pick me up from Mile Marker 103 in her Fiat. I drove us home and Saturday morning Cheyenne and I made the three and a half hour round trip to collect the Vespa from its overnight resting spot. 

Dusty and well worn after our Everglades adventure I need to figure out what happened and why and start the testing process again. Right now I have to ride the automatic Vespa and the Bonneville which is no hardship though I am puzzled why the old girl seized. I shall enjoy the detective work. 

 I have to say I did rather miss the Bonneville on the trip which was an interesting reaction to me. The motorcycle has all the speed you need to keep up with and pass regular freeway traffic and headwinds, cross winds, hills and gravel are no worry to my versatile Triumph motorcycle. I was surprised really how tedious droning across the landscape at 55 could become. 

The Vespa is ideal in the Keys where restricted speed limits become a drag on a 65 hp motorcycle. The Bonneville enables me to pass about any car and puts me front and center for attention I don't really want. The Vespa keeps me honest and allows me to relax and enjoy the ride even at what would otherwise be a tedious 45 mph. After 45  years of riding I have found my ideal bike in the Bonneville, a great all rounder and great fun to ride. The Vespa is my nostalgia machine an an ideal short hop ride.

But on the open road the Bonneville remains my preferred ride. I could have cut off all the Krome Avenue nonsense with the Triumph by hopping on I-75 and zipping up the Turnpike at an unobtrusive 75 mph. And in 85,000 miles the Bonneville has stopped running only once after giving me lots of warning (that I ignored) when the rectifier, a hundred dollar part, failed and the battery went flat and I couldn't  restart the bike during an interrupted commute. Another time it took a long time to start after a rainstorm but a pair of new plug wires and caps solved that. I need to respect the limitations of each ride and enjoy both and while the Vespa is laid up I need to commute slowly on the Bonneville! I'm lucky to have the choices and lucky my wife hasn't yelled at me for screwing up. What a great trip it was - next time on the Bonneville!