“Have no fear of perfection – you’ll never reach it.”
– Salvador Dali
See that broken metal? That’s where the fuse blew.
Terra Nova has been offline for almost a year, months of neglect on my part stemming from work, momentary and enduring distractions, and angst over the Scooter Cannonball1.
Still, there’s no excuse2.
She turned over but failed to start when I started futzing with her in earnest about a month ago. I drained the gas, put in fresh fuel, and charged up the battery. No luck.
I simply stuffed it in the wrong way (on left) figuring the battery size was wrong. Jesus Christmas.
I ordered a new YTZ12S battery at the local Yamaha/Honda/Suzuki/Kawasaki/Ducati/Can-am/Kymco/Kayo/Polaris/Sea-Doo dealer3, recovered from the shock of the price4, and waited.
I picked up the battery on Wednesday and installed it on Saturday. And that’s when I did something really, really (really) stupid; I put it in backward, hooked up the cables and promptly blew the 50 amp main fuse5.
I understand how it happened and if I would have taken another 30 seconds to think about it, I might have gotten it right. It’s one of those things I’ll never get over. In a way, that’s a good thing, because it lessens the chance I’ll do it again.
Found the portside turn signal was broken, too. I ordered a replacement online. God, that bike is dusty.
The screw-up becomes even more confounding when I vividly recall a story from Mark Day6, an old friend from high school.
I mean vivid: He and I were sitting at a cafeteria table at Heskett Junior High School – now Heskett Middle School – in Bedford Heights, Ohio. He was describing how he accidentally dropped a wrench while working on his car.
The wrench – a Craftsman open-end – fell exactly across the two battery terminals and part of the battery top blew off. Mark was okay, but it was unexpected and scary.
One of those trusty blue Bic Cristal pens.
He even drew a sketch – on white paper with a blue Bic ballpoint pen, seriously – of how the wrench hit the terminals. I can still see his sketch in my mind.
I have never, ever, forgotten his story and I think of it every time I open a car hood. So Mark has probably saved me from blowing up my own battery more than once over the years.
At least the Vespas are still online.That’s Terror in the back.
I went back to the Yamaha/etc. dealer and ordered two 50 amp main fuses7, since Gus, the parts guy8, did not have them in stock.
I sent this story to a few friends, and a response from Karl Gelles about jumping a battery made me remember Mark Day’s experience.
The Yamaha fuse will arrive next week and I’ll pick up the installation again.
Wish me luck, or at least less stupidity. And let this tale be your Mark Day sketch when you work on your own battery.
__________
1 – Terra Nova is my 2012 Yamaha Super Tenere. I spent riding time aboard Terror and Erebus, the two Vespas, in preparation for the 2023 Scooter Cannonball. Not that it did much good.
2 – Endurance, my 2000 BMW R1150GS, has been in statis for much longer. I think I’ll end up taking her to a shop for resuscitation.
3 – That is not an exaggeration.
4 – It was $238, the most I’ve ever paid for a battery.
5 – Which is bad, but it’s better than burning out the ECU, the engine control unit. God knows what replacing that would cost.
6 – Mark Day has graced this site with previous mentions. He and Tom McCray did an epic motorcycle ride from Cleveland to Virginia Beach in like 1976 that made me jealous. Good guys, both of them.
7 – One for the bike and one for a spare.
8 – Gus is a good guy and did not laugh once while I was there, explaining the problem. No telling what happened after I left, of course.
Note from the mission historian: The 2023 Scooter Cannonball was an eight-day, 3,170 mile checkpointed ride across the U.S. from San Clemente, California, to Hilton Head, South Carolina. It started June 18th and ended June 25th. Cannonball events are held every two years and are limited to scooters of 278ccs or less.
I piloted “HMS Terror,” #61, a 2016 Vespa 300cc GTS Super Sport(rounded up from its actual 278 by Piaggio marketing). She has about 22 hp and I named her after one of the two ships of the 1839 James Clark Ross Antarctic expedition.
I rode very slowly and carefully and finished almost dead last.
***
HMS Terror on NM 197
Day 03 | Tuesday, June 20: Checkpoint 3 is a lonely three-pump fuel station selling only low 86 octane and diesel on a desolate stretch of New Mexico 197. The temperature hovers in the low 90s as I arrive with Virginia Cherry, a riding partner.
This is the Torreon Store and Gas Station in Cuba, New Mexico, a mandatory checkpoint1 worth 95 points, but we’d be stopping here even if we didn’t have to. The hot, dry air is sucking the life out of us, and despite the cool water in my Camelbak I’m dying for a cold bottle of Gatorade.
We’ve come about 257 miles today and have been hopscotching with fellow Cannonballers Stephen Terrien from New Hampshire and a few others.
That’s not unusual. Motorcyclists and scooterists tend to find their own pace and often encounter those traveling at similar speeds.
Virginia Cherry and Stephen Terrien. With cold drinks, we feel better.
We exchange greetings and commiserate over the heat; it’s good to see them again, to know they’re okay.
We fuel up and do the Cannonball documentation with our smartphones, sending photos and GPS coordinates to event organizers to prove we are here. Then we hit the store for drinks and the restroom, which is unexpectedly elegant in an Algonquin-of-the-West sort of way.
“Steve, visit the restroom even if you don’t have to pee,” I say. “It looks amazing. You’ll thank me later.”
“I will,” Stephen says, and laughs.
Charles Beck fueling up.
Other riders arrive, fuel up and leave, including Charles Beck2 from South Carolina and Steve Putnam3 from Florida. They’re moving fast and steady, riding much more efficiently than me.
Steve Putnam and Virginia.
Then a third rider on a loaded scooter appears at the pumps and we say hello. This is James4 and he does his documentation and wearily takes a seat in the shade of the store.
He’s tired like the rest of us, a little more, maybe.
We strike up a conversation and I ask what drew him to the Cannonball. He tells us he’s doing it for the adventure and has wanted to do it for years.
“I saved up for a long time,” he says after a moment. “I don’t really make much. I’m sort of a janitor at a hospital and I clean up the bloody messes after surgeries and such.
“I was even selling my plasma to get extra money.”
I tell him I admire his dedication and ask if I can take his photo. “I’ll email it to you,” I say.
He laughs through his fatigue and says he’ll show the photo as proof to some people “who didn’t believe I’d be doing this. They thought I’d sell my vacation time and wouldn’t go.”
We wish each another good luck and Virginia and I leave. We have a long way to go.
But I’ll remember James in the miles ahead, marveling at (and envying) his perseverance. The Cannonball is a difficult, expensive, exhausting undertaking, especially for us rookies. I think he’s worked harder than most of us to get here.
The road ahead.
I think of that as the sun bakes us and the taste of cold Gatorade vanishes, and we bounce and rumble down the empty, arid road.
* * *
1 – There are three mandatory checkpoints that riders must document or else lose all points for the day.
2 – Charles, on a 2021 Honda PCX 150, finished 101st overall. 173 riders were at the start; some dropped out along the way for various reasons, including mechanical difficulty.
3 – Steve, on a 2007 Honda Helix, finished 135th overall.
4 – Not his real name and in time you will understand why.
Note from the mission historian: The 2023 Scooter Cannonball was an eight-day, 3,170 mile checkpointed ride across the U.S. from San Clemente, California, to Hilton Head, South Carolina. It started June 18th and ended June 25th. Cannonball events are held every two years and are limited to scooters of 278ccs or less.
I piloted “HMS Terror,” #61, a 2016 Vespa 300cc GTS Super Sport(rounded up from its actual 278 by Piaggio marketing). She has about 22 hp and I named her after one of the two ships of the 1839 James Clark Ross Antarctic expedition.
I rode very slowly and carefully and finished almost dead last.
***
If Virginia conducted riding classes, I would sign up.
Day 04 | Wednesday, June 21: Virginia Cherry and I split up on the unpaved trail leading to Checkpoint 1 this day, mostly because she’s a superbly skilled rider on any road and I’m like skidding across ice with bald tires.
She makes Checkpoint 1 (an abandoned building in Octate, New Mexico) and is urged by a Cannonball support driver to go head without waiting for me, which she does, and later feels bad about.
By the time I get there, she is far ahead of me, which is fine because I go at my own (admittedly slower) pace and wonder about the country I’m passing through. Some of the small towns, once prosperous, are abandoned and desolate. I wonder what happened to them.
Checkpoint 1: Octate, New Mexico.
As expected, it’s another hot day. Checkpoint 2, an abandoned farmhouse on Yates Road, looks haunted1 with its windmill clattering slowly in the breeze.
Probably not haunted, but kinda spooky nonetheless.
I stop for gas at Allsup’s Convenience Store in Clayton, New Mexico, and find fellow riders I know – Bill Redington, Stephen Terrien, and Paul Cronin. It’s really good to see them and we talk about what we’ve seen and laugh together.
Then I hear another scooter arrive and it’s James, the rider from yesterday, catching up with us. He parks at one of the pumps, shuts down, and says hello while pulling off his helmet and jacket. He’s clearly knackered in the heat.
“How are you doing?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “I’m okay. Hot.” He begins fueling up.
I roll Terror from the gas pump to the last parking space in front of the store and go back to talk with the other riders. Paul leaves and Bill is saying something about bad weather when we hear a crash and clatter of metal.
Allsup’s in Clayton, New Mexico.
I turn and see James’s scooter and Terror on their sides on the ground, with James in-between. Someone from the store is already there, trying to help. I dash over.
It looks bad. James appears to be stuck and I can’t tell if he’s hurt. I yell for the others but they’re already on their way.
We lift the scooter off James and the store guy gets the sidestand down. Bill helps James stand up but he’s unsteady and wobbles like he’s going to fall. I grab hold and together we get him upright.
“I’m okay, I’m okay,” he says, and staggers toward the store. “I just need something to drink.”
Stephen tries to get James to sit down but he keeps moving. “I think he’s dehydrated,” Stephen says.
I’d question the effectiveness of the artwork, but you get the point.
That’s when the warning about dehydration from fellow rider Eric Semple2 comes soaring into my head. “You have to drink,” Eric had said a day or two earlier. “Dehydration sneaks up on you and you won’t know what hit you.”
Meanwhile, the others have stood Terror upright. I check for damage but I don’t see anything other than a bent eyebolt in the rear luggage plate3. That’s where the scooter hit the Vespa, pushed it off its centerstand, and onto the pavement.
James recovers and says he is sorry about the Vespa. I tell him not to worry. Bill suggests we ride together to the next checkpoint and we agree.
“Why don’t you take point and I’ll bring up the rear?” I suggest to Bill. That means James will have riders in front and behind him.
Rusty grain elevators in Felt, Oklahoma.
That’s how we ride to Checkpoint 3, the last of the day, a group of rusted out grain elevators in Felt, Oklahoma, about 23 miles away. We take our photos and certify our locations and set off again for Guymon, ready to end this day.
But the weather has other ideas.
Storm clouds have been seriously building ahead of us and the wind starts picking up. Rain sprinkles a bit but the gusts are strong enough to batter us on the road. I’ve ridden in bad wind before but this is starting to get scary.
The storm in the distance.
Bill pulls over and we all stop.
“This is looking bad,” he says. “You can go ahead if you want, but I’m going to turn around and wait this out back there.”
It’s a sensible idea – I’m secretly relieved – so we follow him back to the rusted sheet metal silos of Checkpoint 3. If we need a support truck, they’ll know exactly where we are, which is about 60 miles from Guymon.
The wind threatened to knock over the scooters.
We park our scooters on the side of the road and wait for more than an hour, as Bill monitors the storm’s movements by smartphone with the help of his brother back East.
At times the wind is strong enough to rock the scooters, so much that we sit on or keep a hand on them to prevent a tip-over.
We waited out the storm.
Finally the storm clears and we proceed. It’s dark by the time we get to Guymon but we are too tired to care, I think. Everyone is all right: Bill, Stephen, James, myself, and a rider named Eddie who joined our group to wait.
Later, we learn that some riders were pummeled by rain and hail.
As the storm clears, Eddie and Bill prepare to leave.
Next morning, Day 05, I take my spare Camelbak4, a new one with the tags still on it, and find James packing his scooter in the Hampton’s parking lot.
“Here,” I say, “This is an extra. Why don’t you take it? It may make the ride easier.”
He looks at it, then at me. “No, thank you,” he says. “I’m dropping out.”
I’m stunned. “Seriously?”
“I’m tired and I’m packing it in,” he says. “I’m just getting rid of a bunch of stuff and going home.”
“Wait a sec,” I say. “We’re halfway done.”
It’s true. We’ve covered about 1,500 miles with roughly 1,670 to go.
“You’ve done a lot to get this far – not many people can say that. You can keep going,” I say.
“No,” he says. “I’m going home.” Then he pauses and says, “This isn’t the first time. It’s happened before. There’ve been other instances.” And there’s a ship-lost-at-sea look of resignation in his eyes that breaks my heart.
He continues strapping bags to the scooter. And I try to find the words that will make him see otherwise and I fail, miserably. I know the Cannonball is not an easy ride; I’ve thought about quitting, myself. The heat and fatigue and effort are exhausting.
“Take the Camelbak anyway,” I say. “For the ride home.”
He shakes his head, says, “no, thank you” and turns away with finality and I realize that there is nothing I can do without making him resent me for interfering. And I am so damned inadequate and sorry.
Virginia will tell me that she also tried to talk to him and he rather snapped and said Look, I’m going home, okay?
I see Stephen a bit later and relate what happened. “That’s unfortunate and I’m sorry to hear that,” he says. “But it’s his decision to make. It’s up to him.” And Stephen is right, of course.
“A single righteous act can tip the balance and make all the difference.”
Day 04 was a long day but we’d dealt with it, the heat, scooters falling over, and dodging a storm.
And now I learn again that sometimes, despite our best effort and intention, nothing can be done.
Even so, I wish that we – James and me – had been able to tip the balance on that morning of Day 05.
***
1 – Which makes me compose a ghost story in my helmet about a motorcycle rider who pauses in front of a farmhouse to take a picture and talks with a little girl who invites him in for a cup of cold water. He politely declines and later learns that the house has sat empty for years.
2 – That’s VespaChef #8, a superb rider, chef, outdoorsman and raconteur. A true Renaissance Man, one might say.
3 – I wonder if the Vespa’s headset’s been knocked out of alignment and check that, too, but it looks okay. Moto Richmond later assures me it’s good.
4 – Linda suggested I try one during the hellishly hot ride home from San Diego in 2007 and I’ve been using it on every long ride since. They really do help. Some riders use water bottles mounted on the bike instead of backpacks, but the result is the same.
Charley did the most incredible bodge job, using about 40 cable ties to strap two wrenches as splints across the split in the frame.
– Ewan McGregor, “Long Way Round”
Not very pretty, but still pretty sturdy.
Saturday, Oct. 22 | Day 18: It wasn’t perfect, but I did manage a classic bodge job1 on Terra Nova’s sidestand2 when it started bending under all the weight I stupidly put on the bike.
After fueling up somewhere in Georgia on the way home, I suddenly stopped dead in my tracks and looked at the Yamaha — I mean, really looked at it — and I said to Linda, “Does that sidestand look like it’s bending?”
“Yes, it does,” she said.
It was a true son-of-a-bitch moment. Ever since the sins of the 2020 ride, when I failed to monitor the engine oil in Linda’s Vespa, I’ve been a religious convert to fanatically checking both motorcycles every morning during our long-distance tours.
The fervor was part of this year’s pilgrimage, but it wasn’t enough. As you’ll see, I still haven’t learned the art of packing light. (We’ll talk about that elsewhere.) I knew the Yamaha was overloaded but I didn’t think the sidestand would be affected.
We left the gas station and got to the hotel, where I conducted an internal all-night debate in my mind, serious as the Nuremberg Trials, on whether I should leave the sidestand for later or try to improvise a brace now.
Santee Hardware, with a kind, competent staff.
In the morning (shades of the St. Pete Beach Ace Hardware!) I found Santee Hardware3 about a half-mile away. They didn’t have any suitable angle iron but they did have 12-inch lengths of half-inch square solid steel rod I thought would work. The problem was, I needed a piece only 8 inches long.
“Can you cut 4 inches off of this?” I asked one of the guys who worked there.
“We don’t really do any cutting,” he said.
“Here’s the problem,” I said. “I’m on a motorcycle, on my way home to Virginia, and I need this to be 8 inches long for a brace. Can you help me out?”
He took the piece to a back room, put it in a vise and used a Sawzall to cut it. He even smoothed down the rough edges on a grinding wheel.
I bought the metal, a handful of hose clamps, and a 5/16 nut driver to tighten them down. “If this works, you won’t see me again,” I told the guy at the cash register and he laughed.
The six hose clamps may not look like much, but they’re strong.
I took it all out to Terra Nova in the parking lot next door and fashioned a brace to prevent the stand from further disfigurement. I rode back to the hotel feeling better.
Making repairs and checking oil and tires admittedly isn’t very exciting, but every motorcycle traveler/author scribbles something about maintenance. There’s something deeply self-satisfying about catching and fixing a mechanical problem that could have disrupted your ride.
In the unused parking lot next door.
Robert Pirsig, for example, writes about tuning up the engine of his Honda Super Hawk in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and describes his satisfaction in doing it right.
It’s another essential aspect of two-wheel travel, one of many that sets motorcycles apart from cars.
In a car, you can find suitable parts and oil just about anywhere, but if you have a motorcycle, or (God help us) an exotic motorbike or scooter like a Vespa, you have to prepare, pre-service, and carry what you need with you, including special made-for-motorcycle oil.
The portable AirHawk air pump, which plugged into Terra Nova’s power system, was perfect for keeping the tires inflated.
Otherwise, if you break down 300 miles from a Vespa dealer, you’re stuck4.
At home, I do motorcycle maintenance in the cozy confines of the phone-booth-size workshop at Starbase 8. While traveling on the road, other locales are pressed into service.
*
“For a temporary shop, your first consideration is to look around for the best available floor. It could be the pavement you’re parked on, the shoulder of the road, or a supermarket parking lot.”
In my case, that means commandeering parking lot spaces out in the good-weather open as I did in Santee, or (with the consent of bemused hotel clerks) driveways beneath grand entrance canopies.
So, using Terra Nova’s rear luggage plate as my workbench, I did my little daily reassuring rituals of checking oil levels and tire pressures and whatnot – everything except for the sidestand.
Tools on the rear rack.
But the oil was easy. Terra Nova had been fully serviced5 before we left and her oil level never changed. The Vespa was a different story; the oil consumption varied based on the speed at which we’d traveled the day before. A faster pace guaranteed more oil usage.
That’s because Linda has a 2020 Vespa with a 300cc HPE, a high-performance engine that puts out about 24 hp6 and burns a lot of oil during its 6,000-mile break-in period. The consumption is a bit startling until you get used to it.
Motorcycles and scooters require the aforementioned motorbike-specific oil so I carried about a pint for Terra Nova and a quart and a half for the Vespa. I brought along funnels, shop rags, and enough plastic storage bags to choke a Safeway7.
Scrap cardboard to minimize oil drops.
I also took care to scrounge pieces of used cardboard for the inevitable oil drips of the dipstick and funnel, not wanting to leave oily stains on nice clean pavements and irritate the hotel folks who graciously let us park there.
You wouldn’t want any engine oil on those bricks, for example.
So the oil was okay. The only surprise came after we got home and I started looking at replacement sidestands and discovering some of them had pre-formed bends. Even past photos of Terra Nova indicate, from certain angles, that some sort of bend was already there.
I don’t know for sure yet, but I’m tempted to say the stand had a bend that was later made worse by the luggage weight.
But the inner glow of bodge-jobbing the sidestand — a sort of Pirsig Zen Buddhist calm satisfaction, I suppose — stayed with me for the ride home and after.
*
1 — Bodge job is British term that means temporary repair. A botched job, on the other hand, is a screwed-up affair.
2 — Or a kickstand, as some philistines would call it.
3 — In Santee, South Carolina, a great hardware store.
4 — I suppose you could put car oil into your motorcycle just to get it to safety, if you had approximate viscosity and synthetic content and nothing else was available. Still, the thought of an engine tearing itself up from insufficient lubrication is enough to cause cardiac arrest in a rider. That’s why I willingly carry all that rather heavy oil.
5 — And I have the bill from the Yamaha dealer to prove it. You’d think I was paying off the national debt of France or something.
6 — Which makes it Vespa’s most powerful engine these days.
7 — Maybe all that stuff conspired to help bend the sidestand.
Parked out front. The damage was from Hurricane Ian.
Tuesday, Oct. 11 | Day 7: I think only good friends Andrew Virzi, Tom McCray and Karl Gelles will truly understand this one, but if you’re feeling optimistic, do continue. I’ll keep it short since this is a rather quirky piece about hardware stores.
Interjection from the mission logistician: Owning and modifying a motorcycle or Vespa means doing at least some work on your own. Accordingly, you end up fabricating some parts and even tools. Thus, hardware stores can sometimes be among your best friends.
Aisle of Dreams: Linda searches for hard-to-find corks.
After four days of motorcycle travel, Linda and I got to St. Pete Beach late Saturday afternoon and took some time to relax and sort things out. Part of this required a stop at the South Pasadena Ace Hardware.
We’d been here before, but only briefly. Linda ended up looking for corks for her antique bottle collection and we ended up down one long aisle where I was amazed to see cabinet after cabinet of specialty screws, nuts and other items, many of which I’ve sought in the past without success, others I didn’t know existed.
Knurled thumb screws!
It had everything, including (1) classy, knurled thumb screws that would have looked good on a set of Campagnolo downshift levers; (2) brass acorn nuts; (3) plastic caps for buttoning over the scratchy heads of screws.
And it was so clean and thoughtfully organized, not the sad chaotic mess one usually finds in the well-picked-over aisles of Home Depot or Lowe’s.
The promise of joy within.
I bought a 24mm 12-point socket (I would have preferred a 6-point) for the oil drain fitting and some rubber plugs that may work to prop open the passenger peg extensions aboard Erebus and Terror, two Vespas that were parked a thousand miles away.
South Pasadena Ace Hardware was so nice I wanted to move there, which is ridiculous, but it’s a testament to how important well-stocked hardware stores are. At least to me.
While checking over Terror1, the 2016 Vespa I recently bought from a nearby Vespa dealer2 to use in the 2023 Scooter Cannonball, I discovered they’d drastically over-filled the engine oil.
The oil on the dipstick was way above the MAX mark – which is not good, of course, since too much oil means too much pressure inside the engine, causing leaks and other damage.
I put about 8 miles on Terror just riding it home, which shouldn’t present a problem.
The discovery sent me scurrying to the Vespa manual.
The dealer said they’d changed the engine oil and transmission oil before selling it. I asked about brake fluid, since it’s hygroscopic and absorbs water over time.
You really don’t want that. Water in brake fluid compromises braking and causes rust in steel brake lines and elsewhere in the system.
They said they didn’t know when it was last changed but said their mechanic “looked at” the brake fluid, presumably in the reservoir, and said it was okay.
Apologies, but that’s bullshit, too. You need to test the fluid with special test strips or an electronic meter – you can’t just “look” at it. Everything I’ve ever read says you should change the fluid every two years or so.
This 2016 Vespa is six years old.
Terror, with proper oil level, shortly before departure for Richmond.
But back to the engine oil. On Friday night, after sticking a clean plastic straw down the filler hole, I laboriously and patiently and carefully sucked out the excess oil like it was a toxic milkshake.
Motul 4T 5W-40 full synthetic looks like red wine salad dressing but most certainly does not taste like it.
I got the engine oil level down to where it should be. The excess went into a gallon jug that formerly held Arizona iced tea. It was about ¾ inch deep, which seems a frightful amount.
Moto Richmond’s new digs, at 6000 Midlothian Turnpike. A nice upgrade for them.
On Saturday, I rode the Vespa 153 miles south to Scoot Richmond3. They’ll change the brake fluid and engine coolant, to give me a baseline of maintenance. Linda and I will pick it up on Saturday, Aug. 6.
And that was the latest Vespa adventure, with the apparent lesson being you have to check everything.
Linda and I had lunch at the Riverside Tavern in Richmond. It was pretty good, you should try them.
_ _ _
1 — Which is named after the second ship of the James Clark Ross expedition to the Antarctic in 1839. We’ve been over this before, right?
2 — Who shall remain anonymous. The sales person was very nice, though.
3 — Who has the only Vespa mechanics I can trust, apparently. It doubles my regret at not waiting and purchasing a similar vintage Vespa that popped up on their site after I bought Terror.
Former faux motto of the Daily Kent Stater, the student newspaper at Kent State University
Erebus (No. 6) and Terror.
Sometimes it’s hard to justify an act of commerce, even with motorcycles, but I bought a used 2016 Vespa 300cc Super Sport to pilot in the Scooter Cannonball.
The idea of doing the 2023 Cannonball – an 8-day coast-to-coast rally limited to scooters of 300ccs or less – started germinating like Japanese knotweed in the back of my mind after I wrote about it for USA Today last year.
It’s one of my favorite stories and I think that’s because I had a great time talking to the riders I interviewed. Fascinating people, every one.
So now I have two Vespas.
Map of the 2023 Scooter Cannonball in the hallway of Starbase 8.
There’s an indescribable feeling you get when crossing the dividing line between spectator and participant. I felt it most keenly in my first Marine Corps Marathon, taking my place among the other runners and thinking to myself I’m really doing this at last.
Likewise, writing about the Cannonball made me think could I do this?
The marathon had its roots in my high school cross-country days, back in the Pleistocene era1. The Cannonball dream is more recent, of course, and I’m learning more about its logistical demands, which are roughly akin to those of the Normandy invasion.
The colors are close but not exact; Terror is “grigio” which is “gray” in Italian, and Erebus is “Sei Giorni Grey,” which has some blue mixed in. Go figure.
The planning elements comprise a long list2, but choice of scooter – what am I going to ride? – is probably paramount.
Scooters get punished during the Cannonball. Small engines aren’t intended for sustained high-speed travel over 8 to 10 days and riders often do maintenance chores in hotel parking lots when they’d much rather be sleeping in their rooms 10 feet away.
A 22 hp Vespa is considered “super,” in case you were wondering.
I could take Erebus, my 2020 Vespa Sei Giorni, but it’s sort of a special-edition model and I started having visions of being dopey-tired and dropping it at gas stations and such. I really didn’t want to bash her up3.
That made me think about getting a second scooter, one, er, nice but not as nice as Erebus but still sturdy enough to get me across the country. Linda and I looked at Japanese scooters4 but then I saw the 2016 on La Moto Washington’s website.
Terror will get a new windscreen and rack, similar to the one on Erebus.
It’s a 2016 Vespa Super Sport, a 300cc scooter with ABS, much like Erebus but less sporty-appearing. The engine isn’t an HPE like Erebus and Linda’s GTS but it’s still powerful, relatively speaking5, and has longer maintenance intervals. It had 872 miles on the odometer.
Long story short, I rode it home eight miles in the rain today.
I had to give her a name and, continuing my preference for naming my motorcycles after Antarctic exploration ships6, chose the moniker Terror, after the second ship of the James Clark Ross expedition of 1839-1843. Erebus was the first7.
The glovebox, which is too small to hold gloves.
Terror is in my workshop now at Starbase 8 with 880 miles on the clock. I’ll start learning how to work on it, how to change engine oil and filters and how to replace transmission belts and variator and clutch rollers. It will be a steep learning curve for me.
I’ll baby Terror and take care of her, but I’ll be secure knowing that I can take a tumble and – while aghast at the damage I’m causing8 – think: At least I’m not fucking up Erebus.
_ _ _
1 – Admittedly, I wasn’t a very good runner, then or now. I’ve had bystanders tell me to just get a cab.
2 – That’s not an exaggeration. You have to decide if/how to ship your scooter to the starting line, reserve rooms at hotels/motels along the way, arrange for space on support vehicles and figure out how you’re going to get your scooter home when the rally is over.
3 – Any motorcycle or scooter can get damaged while traveling but the Cannonball carries a higher risk because of long days, insufficient sleep, enforced timelines and intense navigation. I just didn’t want to risk Erebus like that.
4 – A Honda ADV 150 or Yamaha SMAX were on the list. They have smaller engines and less power than Terror but are considered extremely reliable.
5 – Terror has 22 hp; Erebus has 24.
6 – It’s true; I have three motorcycles and two Vespas of my own (not counting Linda’s Vespa and Yamaha Vino) and all but one has an Antarctic-related name.
The outlier is Santiago, the 1965 Honda CL-77 awaiting restoration in a shed out back. It’s named after one of the five ships Magellan took on his circumnavigation voyage in 1519.
7 – Both were constructed as “bomb ships,” built with extremely strong hulls to withstand the impacts of naval explosions. Sadly, they were lost during the 1845 Franklin expedition to find the Northwest Passage in the Arctic. Erebus was found in 2014; Terror was discovered in 2016.
8 – And will fix, since it’s a really nice scooter.
I signed up for the 2023 Scooter Cannonball1 – a scooter-only, 8-day event covering 3,170 miles – on June 25, the day registration opened, and the same day I tried to fire up Linda’s Vespa 300 GTS and found it wouldn’t start.
It was irony of the highest sort, since the Cannonball is a long-distance event in which participants ride scooters of 300ccs (or less) across the country. Scooters aren’t really meant for that type of distance and riders typically do scooter maintenance in hotel parking lots at night.
My rider name – pronounced “Yer-ko,” thank you – and number.
So the work of getting her Vespa back online became a learning experience, a dry run of sorts for the Cannonball, since breakdowns are common during the event. Riders are expected to at least attempt to make their own repairs, though fellow competitors often offer help2.
The Vespa hadn’t been run in a while. I pulled the Dow cover, rolled it from underneath the patio overhang and turned the key.
Creating the usual mess…
The system initialized: the dash lights came on, the fuel pump pumped, but when I hit the starter button, I was rewarded with only a single click from somewhere in the engine.
One tries to be rational and methodical in times like these but I couldn’t help but think: “What if this were happening at a hotel in Guymon, Oklahoma, in the morning?3 What would I do?”
I charged up the battery, tried the starter again without success, and found the battery level had fallen again. From experience with Endurance’s battery, I figured that was the problem.
Inside the workshop for the new wire connection.
We dashed to La Moto Washington before they closed and got a new battery, which didn’t solve the problem. So I was feeling rather clueless.
I started searching online for solutions and to watch Robot’s instructional videos on scooterwest.com5. I traced the clicking to the starter relay under the saddle and checked it by swapping out the relay from Erebus, which has the same engine as Linda’s Vespa.
Erebus fired up, but the other Vespa didn’t. So it wasn’t the starter relay.
A ring terminal, like this.
I started poking about the engine, looking to check the spark plug and spied a rubber sparkplug-like boot and pried it off, only to see a stud, a nut and the business end of a broken ring terminal, a dime-sized fitting used here to connect a wire to the engine block. Could this be it?
I modified a ring terminal from a box of spare parts, fitted it on the engine, and tried the starter button. The Vespa cranked over and started.
I don’t know what I felt more: relief or amazement at discovering the problem. I have to permanently mount a ring terminal to the engine wire, but that shouldn’t be much of a problem. And now we even have a spare battery.
Down there.
____
1 – I wrote about the Cannonball in 2021 for USA Today online4. It’s one of my favorite stories; I enjoyed talking with nearly a dozen riders, a good group of folks. After some internal deliberation, I decided to sign up myself, though I have a long way to go before I’m actually ready.
2 – It’s part of the camaraderie of the event. Seriously, it’s a wonderful thing to see.
Wednesday, Oct. 6 | Day 1: We make our second gas stop of the day south of Farmville, Virginia, at a quiet, rather forlorn Exxon station1 on U.S. 15. I’m thinking Farmville – sounds like it’s within hollerin’ distance of Mayberry in “The Andy Griffith Show” as we shut down.
We’ve come a scant 160 miles so far, keeping to old U.S. highways and county roads as the mission navigator2 planned. The pace is slower and the views are more rewarding. Farmville itself is interesting, as is Longwood University. We’ve hit rain but the bikes are running fine.
We were in rainsuits for the first two days.
I pay for gas at the pump and move Terra Nova and Linda’s Vespa in front of a blocked-off garage. Inside the store, I fetch the obligatory bottles of Mountain Dew (original) and Diet Dr Pepper for the flight crew3.
Mountain Dew and Diet Dr Pepper: Not an official, or even unofficial, sponsor.
Coming out, I glance through the garage doors, noting how both bays are empty of tools and relegated to storage. And that’s when I notice the pink sign, taped to the inside of the glass.
The sign in the garage window.
Rapid REVIVE! Training it says, and asks if its readers are interested in learning how to save lives. It lists free 10-minute training courses in the area, including one at Granny B’s Market on Abilene Road in Farmville.
I just sorta stand there and read it, marveling at:
(1) Its rather cheery presentation, looking like a flyer promoting a garage sale (FREE Walk Up – 10 minute – REVIVE! Training) and its matter-of-fact tone (Are you a friend or family member of someone who uses opioids?)
The TV ad.
Not to mention use of the exclamation mark (!) and the REVIVE! program’s unfortunate harmonic proximity to the dopey “Revive with Vivaran” commercials, which advocated consumption of caffeine pills.
But I didn’t know how far we’ve fallen down the rabbit hole, that it was this bad, to the point where ordinary people are publicly encouraged to get schooled in recognizing opioid overdoses in friends and family members and administering naloxone. And that they’re learning this with quick classes in places like Granny B’s Market4.
A few statistics from the Department of Health and Human Services.
I can’t even begin to imagine what life is like for folks who have to know this, who are aware someone they love could die by overdose.
They take classes and keep Narcan close by and carry on. They may not have a choice, but they have a strength I will never know.
And then there are those unsung heroes on the front lines, preparing and teaching those classes, and distributing thousands of flyers in county after county.
Weeks later, after we return home, I take a basic online class from the Virginia health department and receive a 4 mg dose of Narcan and a pencil-case-sized pouch of overdose emergency supplies. I’ve started carrying them when we’re out and about. God knows if/when I’ll ever need to use them, but they’re there.
It came in the mail.
The thing is, it seems most of the nation has moved on from opioids and is now dealing with the pandemic, and Jan. 6, and the upcoming mid-term elections, and shouting matches over vaccinations, and everything else. We’re just not paying attention anymore. Maybe we’re just not capable.
Our short attention span lets us overlook the pink REVIVE! notices, even those fortified with bold type, capital letters and exclamatory punctuation.
But on the roads ahead, in dusty windows across rural America5, the flyers are still out there. And so are friends and family members and opioids.
–––
1 – I shouldn’t be so judgmental. We were on Farmville Road, in a rural area, and the two garages hinted at ghosts of busy mechanics keeping cars on the road. And look at the triangular awning over the front of the station, on the left – jaunty and daring enough to suggest its designer was a fan of Frank Lloyd Wright.
2 – That would be Linda, of course.
3 – That would be us. Mountain Dew seems to fuel most of my rides these days, I’m afraid.
4 – Where the fried chicken gets rave reviews from Yelp commentators.
5 – And in Washington, D.C. (and no doubt elsewhere) as this article from the Washington Post shows – 10 overdoses with three fatalities in a single day.
Friday, Oct. 8 | Day 3: We took leisurely passage to St. Pete this time, mostly on old U.S. highways or county roads, making it a slower, tramp-steamer-type of motorcycle ride instead of a supersonic rush down the interstate.
I was surprised the pumps hadn’t been taken for someone’s petroliana collection.
It was better for Linda’s Vespa and my Yamaha1. The reward was scenic views, small towns, and a number of abandoned buildings – old gas stations, motels, diners, and other places – that were fascinating and depressing, in a scary story or science fictiony way.
The Interstate truck stop on U.S. 301 in Ulmer, South Carolina, was our first discovery (on Day 3).
The ghost town/ghost story comparison is inevitable, I suppose, though none of these really felt haunted. They were much more understated, like the John Steinbeck story, “The Cottage That Wasn’t There,” written and serialized in the New York Herald Tribune in 1943, during World War II2.
But walking into some of these places (taking nothing but photos) and seeing the rain damage, damp floors and mold also reminded me of Ray Bradbury’s 1950 short story, “The Long Rain,” in which four men crash-land on Venus, a planet of eternal rain, and try to get to safety3.
The roadside sign you can’t miss. It turned out the gas station across the street was abandoned, too.
We’re talking about buildings that used to be popular, once upon a time; you could envision them as set players in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road or part of the background in American Graffiti.
Stopping at these places wasn’t part of the mission profile, but that changed as I realized how many were there and how interesting they were.
I confess to breaking (to Linda’s exasperation) our ride protocol4 by simply pulling over and pulling out a camera whenever I saw something of note.
Out back at the Interstate.
Some reminded me of ghost towns we visited when living in Nevada:
I don’t know why such places attract me. Part of it is history, I reckon; I wonder about the people who worked and visited there, and what led to the abandonment. And whether the businesses and livelihoods could have been saved.
This was the Horne’s in Lawtey.
Take the derelict Horne’s restaurant/souvenir shop in Lawtey, Florida, for example. It appears as though the owners simply walked away from it, leaving counters and shelves stuffed with items, very much as the things left behind in Bodie long ago.
Items left behind at Horne’s.Interior of schoolhouse in ghost town of Bodie, California.
The Interstate truck stop in Ulmer, South Carolina, must have been a thriving business until the construction of I-95 killed it.
Grass is reclaiming the parking lot.Ray’s Place. The other side of the sign said (in faded letters) “The sweetest place to stop.”
And Ray’s Place in Sylvania, Georgia, looked like it was a nice place, way back when.
This BP station in Virginia must’ve closed fairly recently.
There were no spooky incidents to report, only silent rooms and broken windows and dripping rain.
I do wonder what we’d have done if we’d filled up at a strange little gas station and later met someone down the road (probably an ancient, wizened gentleman with hair longer and whiter than mine) who’d say:
“Oh, no, you couldn’t possibly have bought anything there. That place closed down years ago.”
Vespa Sei Giorni GTV, left, and Linda’s Vespa GTS.
1 – Sometimes I regret not taking my Vespa Sei Giorni instead of the Yamaha Super Tenere, though carrying all our stuff was easier. I’ll attempt to pack lighter for the GTV next time, definitely.
2 – A story that grabs the reader unexpectedly; during WWII, a British sergeant tells Steinbeck of walking at night in England from one outpost to another and seeing a house with its lights on and a little old lady inside.
He’s charmed by the scene and reaches his destination without incident but starts thinking of how the house should have blackout curtains since it’s wartime. It slowly dawns on him that the cottage isn’t actually there – it had been bombed by the Germans months earlier with only its walls left standing.
The moss on the floor and holes in the roof of Ray’s Place reminded me of a wrecked Sun Dome.
3 – They’re trying to reach something called a Sun Dome, a structure with an artificial sun. The first one they find has been attacked and destroyed by indigenous Venusians, who punch holes in the roof to let in the never-ending rain. We saw a lot of rain damage ourselves.
The interior of the Interstate truck stop invited another Sun Dome comparison.
“I don’t suppose we can plug up all those holes and get snug here.”
4 – That’s the duty of stopping with notice to your riding partner. Linda sometimes didn’t realize what I was doing until I dropped out of her mirrors and she was forced to turn around to look for me.
Exterior wall braces are often used to arrest decay. These are in Bodie.
5 – Arrested decay is a practice of preserving, not repairing, buildings by preventing them from falling apart with outside braces or other means.
“Brutal couple of years, huh, Charlie? First Dad, then Marcus.”
– Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones1
Saturday, Oct. 16 | Day 11: We bought the flowers, as usual, at the Publix supermarket in Dade City, though this time we carried them aboard Terra Nova to the cemetery down the street.
Flight-wise, our ride to St. Pete Beach, Florida, was much better this year than last. No U-Hauls were needed. We had no mechanical problems, other than a nail in a tire on the return route. More on that later.
Bungeed to Terra Nova’s rear rack.
On the road, there was plenty of time for reluctant reflection (inside my helmet) on 2021 as a year of loss, of both people and places.
My father died of COVID on Jan. 23 and my beloved Aunt Jo of the same on June 12.
And then there was Cyril Kúdela, the Eastern European cousin of my father and Aunt Jo, who died April 29 in Piestany, Slovakia2. Incredibly, he and Aunt Jo wrote each other throughout the Cold War, letters that kept the Petras family connected over decades.
Cyril, on his CZ Jawa motorcycle, with his two daughters Iva and Kamila.
And wise and kind-hearted Bob Russ, a colleague and old friend from my days at the Sandusky Register, died Jan. 23, the same day as my father. He was only 63.
On Linda’s side, Rich Stapin, the husband of her cousin Pat, died Oct. 5.
Our family house in Bedford Heights, Ohio, which my parents bought in 1959, was sold Oct. 12; I’ll never again step foot inside my childhood home.
The house on Eldridge Boulevard in Bedford Heights.
The sale was finalized and proceeds transferred while we were in Florida.
Which explains the necessity of our four visits to Regions bank in South Pasadena, Florida, thanks to miscommunication among Ohio attorneys and title company.Folks here at the bank were super-nice and extraordinarily helpful, especially Nicole.
We parked the bikes in Floral Memory Gardens, trimmed the grass around the headstone, and put flowers in the vase, as we did the year before, and for nearly a dozen years before that.
Emphasis on purple, her favorite.
And, after visiting the cemetery, we found the lot on Bahia Drive in Zephyrhills, Florida, where my grandparents moved in 1963, has a new mobile home on it, owned by strangers.
The lot stood empty after the original house was condemned and torn down a few years ago.
Linda and I had discussed buying the house at one point, but it wasn’t feasible. The owner abandoned it after taking out too many loans he was unable to repay and everything was locked up in legal disputes that continued until the demolition. Another childhood place gone.
The new house on the former site of my grandparents’ home.
We ended the Zephyrhills house-and-memorial-park duty by stopping for ice cream at Dave’s Treats3, the old Twistee Treat4 on Route 54, not far from my grandparents’ former place.
It’s a comforting part of the Zephyrhills ritual.
Time keeps moving but I still don’t know how to deal with loss. I think the only thing left to us is to remember and respect who and what we’ve lost, and to remind those still here that we love them.
And to be aware of what time we ourselves have left, keep moving forward, and live as fully as we can, with few regrets as possible.
Marlene and Linda, during her visit to Washington. We enjoyed showing her the District.
I was thinking of all this (inside my helmet) and I got a text the very next day, Oct. 17, from my cousin Joey that my wonderful cousin Marlene had died.
Marlene was truly a special person and I always enjoyed her wisdom, her outlook on life, and her company.
I last saw her in Cleveland on July 13 and was aware of her medical problems but I did not know how bad they were. Life is ruthlessly taking things away.
2 – The two sections of the family probably would not have known of the other’s existence had it not been for those letters. And Linda and I (and Aunt Jo) wouldn’t have traveled to Slovakia in 2006, our first of three visits.
Drahovce, Slovakia, 2006: Linda, Cyril, Aunt Jo, and Cyril’s grandchildren Linda and Ivo.
It was so good to see Jo and Cyril meet in person at last. We were on the side of the angels that day.
I’ve written about Cyril a few times; I admired him and though we visited him and his family three times, I will always regret not being able to know him better.
3 – The cone-shaped building is irresistible. And the ice cream there is always good.
4 – The buildings are 25 feet tall, according to the company website. They’ve been around since 1983, apparently.
And finally: In the top photo (from a wall in my workshop here at Starbase 8) that’s Dad and my brother Rob with Endurance at the American Motorcycle Association Hall of Fame Museum in Pickerington, Ohio. We’d gone there in the early 2000s to look at Indian motorcycles. On the left is Van Dale Yasek, the father of my best friend Van. Cyril, of course, is there, too.
Saturday, Aug. 21| “I love the songs you play here and on the street, they’re really good,” a woman tells an employee inside This n’ That Amish Outlet in Old Town Warrenton, Virginia, and I restrain myself from yelling, “Yes! I think so, too!” across the store.
I’d unconsciously started noticing the music stream myself – golden oldies, they’d be called these days1 – after we’d wedged the Vespas into a parking space on Main Street.
We were in Warrenton as part of a short, simple 90-mile ride to get us out of the house and back on the saddle, preparatory for the St. Petersburg mission later this year.
“That red Vespa is really cool. That’s a classic,” said a passerby. He didn’t say anything about Erebus, which by empirical observation alone is way cooler.
The realization crept up in a subtle way with me thinking, gee, that’s an oldie and then haven’t heard that one in a while and suddenly, wait, what’s going on?
I feel silly asking, but a very polite staffer at The Open Book tells me their music comes from Spotify, brought in by computer and played on Bluetooth speakers. She doesn’t know what other stores on the street use but says the choice is theirs.
“We use indie-folk because it’s calming and doesn’t distract from people reading,” she says.
Fueling up on the way home. The gas station’s speakers were silent, in case you were wondering.
You hear music in every commercial venue, often to the point of saturation. So you ignore it, even as you’re being manipulated. Retailers often use music to make customers more susceptible to buying things, psychologists say2.
Part of that is music’s ability to shift you in time, to trigger memories you’ve stuffed away. I wouldn’t have been surprised to catch Blind Faith in the bookstore, but it was like the entire town was playing the same Spotify list, making me think it was 1971.
The ride itself was good. Erebus seemed more comfortable, or maybe I’m getting used to being uncomfortable.
The new biography of Malcolm X.
I ended up buying the new biography of Malcolm X at The Open Book. I intended to get it at some point3, but it’s always good to patronize independent bookstores whenever possible, even if insidious, scheming, diabolical music-wielding market researchers will claim the purchase as a victory4.
1 – No Rolling Stones or Beatles, though.
2 – Loud music causes shoppers to leave quickly; soft music entices them to stay. And some studies say music in a minor key is associated with sadness, which shoppers address by buying something to release reassuring dopamine.
3 – I’ve read the 1964 autobiography, written with Alex Haley, but I want to compare this highly regarded new book with the bios written by Bruce Perry in 1991 and by Manning Marable in 2011.
4 – They can also crow about an iTunes sale, since I put “Please Come to Boston” and “No Matter What” on my iPod to be used later in this year’s St. Petersburg soundtrack – the songs I play for Linda in the morning every day of the ride. Look, don’t tell her about them, okay?
Outside Betty’s Restaurant: The green motorcycle jackets do their job of attracting attention.
Saturday, Aug. 14| “I saw your bikes, they look great,” says a guy on the street as we leave Betty’s Restaurant in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, the one with the memorable sign inside.
Our sidewalk fan mentions the fluorescent green motorcycle jackets we have on and Linda says they’re hot in this kind of weather until we’re actually moving. The guy nods and says, “take care, ride safe.”
Parked up the hill.
That’s amazing, I think to myself as we part, since Erebus and Linda’s red Vespa are parked on a side street way up the hill past Shepherd University’s main building.
What a coincidence: He saw the Vespas, came down the hill, and unexpectedly encountered us.
Sign over the sink in the men’s room at Betty’s, which is a really nice restaurant. A waitress said it was put up recently after multiple unfortunate upchucks from unknown sources in a single frustrating day. Linda reports there’s no such sign in the women’s room, in case you were wondering.
They look like they’re built for the Dakar rally and they are beautiful.
Those other bikes.
Ah, so that’s it, he thought the BMWs were ours, I think, and wonder what his reaction would have been if he’d seen the Vespas. Perhaps not as enthusiastic, but still.
All across Shepherdstown, you can find transformed benches like this…
The Shepherdstown reconnaissance was part of a short 135-mile ride charted by the mission navigator2 – who overcame my initial reluctance since I was just too tired – that kept us off interstates and on country roads.
We go through a few small towns that are interesting, though Shepherdstown unanimously wins the day.
…and this…
It’s a college town, obviously, with an artistic, cosmopolitan air that invites one to linger. Even humble sidewalk benches are an integral part of it, transformed into works of art with paint and imagination.
…and this.
We find a really great independent bookstore called Four Seasons Books, one of those rare places of discovery where you walk in and fascinating tomes and titles call out to you from shelves. Books you didn’t know existed. I could have spent a lot and lugged home a double-armful.
Shepherd University’s main building.
We hadn’t been on the scooters for months, owing to work and other matters. I had only 814 miles on Erebus and I’m still not acclimated to riding it after years on motorcycles. The GTV still feels too small and the saddle is uncomfortable.
I know I have to do a lot of work before riding it down to St. Petersburg as we’ve planned and using it in the 2023 Scooter Cannonball rally as I – perhaps insanely – want to do.
Nice architecture.
But Saturday’s ride gets us out and about and it feels good once I get used to being in the saddle again. After a while, the seat doesn’t feel so bad. We ride through some scenic places, including Lock 29 of the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal national park, near the Potomac River.
We end the day with dinner at the Italian Café in Falls Church, our favorite place (where the photo at the very top of this account was taken).
Friend and owner Younes Jafarloo3, is a former sportbike rider and tells us how uncomfortable his Kawasaki Ninja could be after a while on the road. Ninjas have an aggressive riding posture.
“My arms would hurt after a while,” he recalls.
We also stopped at Lock 29 in the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal national park.
Over dinner4, Linda and I relax and talk about what we’ve seen and where we’ll go next. Outside, the sun starts to set and street lamps light up.
Lock 29.
Through the window5 I notice a couple, about our age, intently studying the Vespas and talking about them. The guy seems especially interested; he circles both and gesticulates at Linda’s GTS.
I’m mildly curious about what he has to say and if he’s been on scooters himself, but I stay where I am and don’t break the moment. At least he doesn’t think we’re on BMWs.
1 – Like Endurance, my 2000 R1150 GS, only 20 years later.
2 – That would be Linda, of course.
3 – Younes is a great guy who sold his Ninja years ago; I confess to pestering him (gently, I hope) about getting another bike or scooter. He sat on Erebus once but graciously declined my offer that evening that he take it around the block or across his parking lot.
4 – Which did not include wine, since the Vespas were parked outside and we never, ever, drink and ride. It’s an ironclad rule of our riding protocol.
5 – Because we always maintain a clear line of sight to the bikes whenever we’re in a restaurant or some other place.
The new windscreen, with a “6” added. The black triangle just cried out for something.
Let’s get right to the point: Erebus has been delivered to Richmond for her 600-mile service1 and I’ve spent some time and effort on upgrades for comfort, utility and visual appeal.
I’m still getting accustomed to the small size2 of it – it’s a 2020 Vespa 300 GTV Sei Giorni – but the flat seat, the one obtained with the swap from Linda’s GTS, allows me to sit farther back.
The floorboard rack doesn’t look too obtrusive.
I’ve also started using the passenger footpegs, which make it more comfortable and gives it more of a motorcycle feel3. And I attached an inflatable AirHawk cushion, which is working so far.
I feel a bit less intimidated on the freeway now, even with clueless Virginia drivers passing like they’re in practice for their own private Le Mans. It’s getting better, though. And it does feel good on meandering county roads, with a slower pace and less traffic.
Putting in some distance for the 600-mile service.
One problem is a lack of storage space. There’s a small glovebox-like compartment in the front shield that could conceivably carry a pair of gloves, and a small tub4 below the saddle that can fit a half-helmet, a rain jacket and a real pair of gloves on a good day.
But the Sei Giorni (as we discussed earlier) is patterned after a racing bike, laughable when you think about its 24-hp engine, but still. I want to store tools and rainsuits and spare parts and such without turning it into the truck from the Beverly Hillbillies.
Yep, that there one.
A few other additions:
A windscreen from Scooter West/Vespa Motorsport, along with handlebar-end weights, an extended footpad for the sidestand, a rubber floormat and a small luggage rack for the floorboard. (That’s where the main toolkit will reside.)
From Scoot Richmond: A luggage carrier behind the saddle and a set of crash bars.
I attached two plastic canisters that each hold a 30-oz. MSR fuel bottle. The canisters5 look like a pair of small torpedoes or maybe warp nacelles from a Starfleet vessel.
I spray-painted the plate flat black, to get rid of the studded-chrome look.
Installation of all this was just basic tinkering, though it took me a while to figure out how to position the fuel carriers on the underside of the luggage plate. I also had to fabricate a way to attach them.
But at least now I can carry a half-gallon of gas in reserve.
I dithered over the floorboard rack but decided I liked it. It’s low-profile enough to carry the toolkit without looking junky. It’ll be a pain to remove when it comes time to fuss with the battery, though.
The acclimation process continues. And have you heard about this Scooter Cannonball Run? It’s this coast-to-coast endurance rally, see, and I was thinking…
Stopping for gas.
1 – Though the odometer shows 1,021.7, which makes it plain that the dial is recording distance traveled in kilometers instead of miles. 1,021.7 kilometers equal 634.9 miles, if you want to know.
2 – Relatively speaking, in reference to the BMW and the Yamaha.
3 – Aside from the saddle problems, foot placement can be a bit maddening at times. There’s some space on the floorboards to move your feet around, but I found myself wanting more. I tried folding out the passenger pegs and using them and it works, sorta.
4 – The tubs are called pet carriers because you absolutely can’t carry petsin them.
5 – They’re actually tractor manual carriers from Agri Supply. I read about them somewhere quite a while ago; the MSR bottles fit perfectly. I have a set on Endurance and Terra Nova.
Lexi appears to favor Linda’s Vespa over the Sei Giorni.
“New beginnings are often disguised as painful endings.”
— Lao Tzu
The Vespadebacle ended Saturday1 when we went to Scoot Richmond — where we probably should have gone in the first place — and bought a new 2020 Vespa Sei Giorni GTV.
It was a drama-free, no-regrets event that let me think about the scooter itself during the meandering ride home.
I was gauging how it felt, the way it handled, and whether I’d be scared silly while sharing the freeway with demented, uncaring, inconsiderate northern Virginia motorists who are better at texting than driving.
The “6” is a callback to Vespa’s victory in the 1951 six-day endurance race.
We rolled out of Scoot Richmond’s lot with 7 miles on the clock and hadn’t gone 30 miles when I realized the saddle just wasn’t working. Sliding back on the seat gave my legs and arms more room, but the saddle is contoured and I ended up on the seat’s edge, which felt like sitting on the short side of a 2×4.
I’ve got to get a new saddle, I remember thinking.
But that was the only thing, aside from vibration at stoplights, which is expected since we’re talking about a single-cylinder engine. The Vespa has nice acceleration and was good on the sweeping county roads like U.S. 255 and stable when I got on the freeway. The ABS-equipped brakes felt reliable.
And I didn’t feel ridiculous on it as I thought. How I look may be another matter.
Getting rather crowded out back.
I swapped seats — my first modification! — between the Sei Giorni and Linda’s GTS2 the next day, which will make both of us more comfortable, I think. There’s a list of other changes I’ll be making.
“What’s the idea of a scooter if you already have a motorcycle?” a colleague at work asked, a righteous question, certainly; it’s still hard for me to articulate why I wanted a Vespa.
They’re much quirkier machines than either of my motorcycles but they still have a certain attraction for me.
Racked up about 150 miles on the first day.
I still like both of my motorcycles3 and couldn’t give them up.
The Vespa is something radically different, forcing me to think differently in terms of riding and touring. It’ll be slower-paced, and we’ll have to take less than we usually do. I’m thinking that may be a good thing.
Continuing my predilection for naming my bikes after Antarctic exploration ships, the Sei Giorni will be called Erebus4.
Now we have to figure out where to go.
A stop on the way home.
***
1 — I put a down payment on that poor Sei Giorni at the Honda dealer when it seemed they were making an honest effort to obtain a brown/red key. Sadly, the previous owner did not return their calls and they were flabbergasted by the quoted cost to replace the ECU and ignition switch. They dropped the price a bit more but Richmond offered a better deal on a new bike, with bonafide key and two-year warranty, so I withdrew from Honda and went to Richmond instead.
I still feel bad about that keyless Sei Giorni, though. It deserves better.
2 — The Sei Giorni is essentially the same as Linda’s GTS with the same engine and ABS. The seat swap was with her consent, of course.
3 — Both Endurance and Terra Nova will be around for quite a while.
4 — The HMS Erebus (and the HMS Terror) visited both the Antarctic, in 1841, and headed for the Arctic in 1845. Both were lost until they were rediscovered in 2014.
Yes, that one, the gray-blue one with number 6 on it.
“If passion drives you, let reason hold the reins.”
– Benjamin Franklin
Still captivated by the idea of slower-paced motorcycle touring – a fixation I couldn’t dislodge with a bulldozer – I gave up on the Honda Super Cub 125 after a discouraging dealer encounter and started looking at other small motorbikes.
The focus drifted to Vespa, where I started paying attention to the Vespa Sei Giorni II, a 300cc scooter with the HPE engine, like Linda’s 2020 GTS.
It’s a beautiful machine, even more sexy than the green-and-yellow 300 Racing Sixties HPE I once admired at the dealership in Murfreesboro, Tennessee.
The Sei Giorni (which translates to “Six Days” and pronounced say JOR-nee) is based on the winning team of 125cc Vespa scooters in the 1951 Sei Giorni Internazionale enduro race in Varese, Italy.
The Six-Day Race.
That’s a brutal six-day endurance race. The team won nine gold medals, a stunning success.
Today’s Sei Giorni is styled the same way as those winning scooters, but with updated electronics, fuel injection and ABS. The headlight is mounted on the front fender instead of the handlebars. It’s garnished with the racing number 6, front and rear.
Then and now.
The damn thing grew on me, gnawing at my subconscious, until finally I decided to look for one. The hunt, of course, is turning into an endurance event of its own.
We patronize Scoot Richmond in nearly all things Vespa, but they’re 110 miles from us, a bit too far for casual looking just now.
So on Saturday we went – just to look, you understand – to the closest dealer, La Moto Washington in Arlington, Virginia, whose website said they had one for sale.
“Oh, we have one, but it isn’t here,” said the nice salesperson at La Moto. “We store it off-site since we can’t keep everything here.”
She says she’s there by herself since the other salesperson wasn’t able to make it in and mentions that it might not be a good idea to walk over to the other site because of the cold and ice but we could come back.
This one in Portofino Green.
We say that’s fine, we’ll come back the next Saturday and thank her and take our leave.
Walking back to the Jeep, Linda suggests we go to Richmond but it’s a little late in the day for a long drive and we veto the idea for today.
“Hey,” I say, “why don’t we go back to the Honda dealer? Let’s see if that Super Cub is still there1.”
So we do, and we enter the place, and I walk back to check the row of used bikes and I see…
…a 2020 Vespa Sei Giorni2 with 356 miles3on the odometer. Exactly what I want.
Seriously. It’s right there.
The coincidence is overwhelming – Twilight Zone scary, even! – and I’m marveling as I circle the Vespa. It looks good, really clean, a few minor scuff marks inside the front shield, but still, really, really good.
The sticker on the glove box lid is from Vatican City.
The sales guy, probably young enough to be my grandson, comes over and we talk for a bit and I ask, “so what’s the out-the-door price on this?”
He does a quick calculation in his head and names a figure roughly much more than I would pay. I look doubtful and he says, “I can run some numbers if you like.”
“Well…okay,” I say, convinced nothing will come of this, but the Sei Giorni looks really good so we head over to his desk.
He’s on his computer for a moment and then fetches the sales manager, who turns out to be the same Mr. Killjoy4 from the Super Cub debacle literally 29 days ago.
But Mr. Killjoy is carrying a piece of paper, a printout – hey, the printer’s working! – and says they’ve done some price cutting and hands me the paper. It turns out they’ve had Sei Giorni for 90 days or more, taken as a trade-in. It must’ve been parked downstairs; I haven’t been down there in a while.
The new Vespa is 300cc; the old one, from the race, is 125cc.
The price is a lot less than I expected, still a little high, but a good starting point. The mood is entirely different from last time, there’s no take-it-or-leave-it vibe and I’m actually starting to feel hopeful. We say we’ll think about it, thank them sincerely and leave.
We go home, pull the sales papers from Linda’s 2020 Vespa and find a few discrepancies in dealer prep and so on. We talk the idiocy of getting yet another bike but Linda senses my rising enthusiasm and understands me as usual so we decide to go back and make a counteroffer.
Mr. Killjoy comes back with a counter-counteroffer that’s a hundred bucks higher. I say okay and we get the paperwork started. I call our insurance company and get the Sei Giorni added to the policy.
It’s really happening at last and we wait and let the paperwork machinery whirr along.
I start thinking about the Sei Giorni and what modifications I want to make (larger windscreen, additional brake light, maybe some auxiliary lights on the front) and which Antarctic exploration ship I’m going to name her after.
Then the sales guy looks up and says, “We don’t have an owner’s manual. In trade-ins, we sometimes don’t get one.”
The headlight is on the front fender.
“That’s okay,” I say. “That’s not a problem.”
And it isn’t. I can go online and print one; I’ve already done it with Linda’s Vespa, two copies, one aboard the scooter itself, the other in the garage at Starbase Nashville.
“And,” the sales guy says, “we don’t have a spare key.”
If this story had a soundtrack: Here is where the needle would skip across the record and make a horrible scratching sound and send the tone arm clattering off the stereo.
“Wait,” I say. “You don’t have another key? You don’t have a brown key?”
“Uh, no,” he says. And, as if someone’s tossed a bucket of sand into it, the deal machinery screeches to a halt.
Left to right: Brown key for programming, blue key for ignition, black key for lock on optional top case.
A brief but necessary technical digression…
All modern computerized Vespas are sold with two keys:
A blue key, which is used as a standard ignition key, for day-to-day operation of the bike. It has a tiny transponder chip.
A brown key5, which is the bike’s master key. This is the program key, used to work the bike’s onboard computer and program the bike to accept new keys and a whole lot of other stuff.
When you buy a new Vespa, the salesperson will hand you this brown key and say, literally in bold capital letters:
“DON’T LOSE THIS KEY.
KEEP IT SOMEWHERE SAFE.”
You can get other blue keys as spare ignition keys. (I got two for Linda’s scooter.) However, you need the brown key to program them, to make them work.
It’s an aggravating quirk of the Vespa system. The computer controls an immobilizer system on the bike, which means you can’t start the engine without the properly coded keys. You need the damned keys.
You can’t get a new brown key without replacing the bike’s Electronic Control Unit and the ignition barrel (the thing in the dash with the slot you stick the key into). All that costs a lot of money, upwards of $800 or so with parts and labor.
I am not making that up.
Giuseppe Cau on Number 94 in the 1951 endurance event...
You can get new blue keys cloned but it’s a pain in the ass without the brown key and there’s no guarantee they’ll work.
…and now back to our story
“I’m sorry, but we need to have that brown key,” I say. “That’s a deal breaker.”
The sales guy goes looking for the key without success. It’s not in an office, it’s not aboard the Sei Giorni.
… and Giuseppe Cau today.
We try to explain how necessary the brown key is, but you just know the sales guy and Mr. Killjoy think we only want a key with a different color or something. You can see the disconnect in their eyes.
“I’ll get you the brown key,” Mr. Killjoy says, and I believe he is sincere but I also believe he thinks he’ll just go to the nearest Vespa dealer – La Moto Washington, in another bit of irony – and pick up one.
He wants me to sign the paperwork anyway and I say, I’m sorry, I really like the bike but I can’t do that, not without a working brown key.
So we leave it like that, with them saying they’ll get the key and they’ll call the previous owner to see if he still has it (though he should have surrendered it with the bike as part of the trade-in).
Like 29 days ago, we leave empty-handed.
We get home and I start to think how this will play out and I’m quietly convinced it won’t happen.
We wait.
We’ve been in a Samuel Beckett absurdist play for 20 minutes, talking about keys with different colors and the dealership’s Vladimir and Estragon don’t quite understand because they haven’t done their homework. Vespas can be costly and complicated and dealers don’t like complications when selling used vehicles.
What’ll probably happen is that they won’t find the original brown key or get a new one and I won’t buy the Sei Giorni.
They’ll end up selling it to someone unfamiliar with Vespas and that person will buy it and toddle off and things will be fine until they discover they need a brown key and find out they’re screwed.
I’ll wait and see what happens. If under-powered Vespa scooters can win a six-day endurance race, it’s possible Godot will actually show up with a working brown key.
1 – The Super Cub was still on the floor, but as events transpired, we didn’t look closely at it.
2 – The 2020 and 2021 Sei Giornis come only in gray-blue (grigio, in Italian) which looks good, though the Portofino Green of previous models, which mimicked the 1951 racers, is better.
3 – That’s a little more than half of the mileage for the first break-in service. So in essence, this Sei Giorni is practically brand new.
4 – Not his real name.
5 – Some folks call it a red key, because the color is somewhere in-between, though more toward brown in the spectrum. Chalk it up as just another Vespa peculiarity.
“Based around the air-cooled 125cc single … the 2019 Super Cub is almost as much a time machine as it is a motorcycle.”
– Rider magazine review, Feb. 8, 2019
I’ve been craving a Honda Super Cub C125 without knowing why until the Rider comment that made me realize, yes, that’s it – it is a sort of time machine.
The Super Cub is not the type of motorbike I normally lust after. I prefer adventure-type motorcycles1 like Endurance and Terra Nova, which is why they’re part of the fleet of five2 here at Starbase 8.
I was briefly drawn to a 2021 BMW R1250 GS Adventure at Bloodworth Motorcycles in Nashville last December, a real beauty that got me going until I saw the heart-stopping price of $26,590.
If money were no object…
But something’s been quietly nagging at me at odd moments, the notion that long-distance motorcycle travel need not be aboard a $20,000 BMW Leviathan. Maybe it’d be better if you Marie Kondoed it down to a smaller, slower bike.
Three things sent me down that path:
The Long Way Down documentary in which riders had motorcycles that were a thousand times more expensive than the net worth of all the African villages they were visiting3.
My dream of riding across Vietnam on the largest bike I could rent, which would probably be no more than 250cc’s.
Ed March and his you-have-to-see-it-to-believe-it website C90 Adventures4, which chronicles his insane rides across Canada in winter, Alaska to Argentina, and Malaysia to the UK, all on a Honda C90 Cub.
The Super Cub took residence in my imaginary garage when I first laid eyes on a blue-and-white model at the Washington, D.C., motorcycle show in 2019. It was there because Honda was reintroducing it to American riders for the 60th anniversary of importation to the U.S.
The classic ad.
A time machine. I’d seen pictures of it in motorcycle history books, of course. It was first made in Japan in 1958, then imported to the U.S. in 1959 as a 100cc model. Honda built its sales campaign around it, the ubiquitous You Meet the Nicest People on a Honda. That was in contrast to the hoodlums depicted in the 1953 movie The Wild One5 with Marlon Brando and Lee Marvin.
Marlon Brando.
There was even a song about it, Little Honda, written by Brian Wilson and Mike Love of the Beach Boys. Another group, the Hondells6, covered it and it rose to No. 9 on Billboard 100 in 1964. Give it a listen here on Shindig; you’ll enjoy the song and be grateful for improvements in music videos since then.
Dude, seriously?
Other advances since early Sixties include the bike’s engine, which Honda upgraded periodically. Style-wise, the Super Cub7 looks pretty much the same, with its wide handlebars, round mirrors and signature white leg shields.
Honda stopped exporting it to the U.S. in 1974.
And now the Super Cub is back, in red and white (even better!) for the 2020 and 2021 models, making me dream of riding it with Linda down rolling country roads, stopping for ice cream in small, picturesque towns, bedding down at a B&B in the Adirondacks, and zipping up Highway 1 toward Hanoi in the rain.
A time machine, a dream machine, a simple machine. Something that asks you to slow down and really, really look at where you are.
Classic styling.
So we went to the local Honda motorcycle dealership … and that’s when things started going south.
The sales rep was a good guy but did not seem to know much about the Super Cub on the floor. We tried to open the saddle to look at the gas cap, but it wouldn’t budge – the battery was too low to activate it. They put it on a charger.
That was okay, but then I asked about price, which brought in the sales manager, a Mr. KillJoy8, I think.
He ushered us over to his desk, located (inexplicably) in the Ducati section.
“We don’t have much of a margin on these,” he said, and started futzing with his computer, looking up numbers, finally coming up with a price that was almost $900 over MSRP, which I thought was nearly as outrageous as the $26,000 BMW in Nashville.
Here is where the fuses are located.
He started reading off shipping charges, tax and title, dealer prep and other such nonsense and Linda asked if we could get a printout.
“Our printer isn’t working,” Mr. KillJoy said.
The whole enterprise crumbled into a take-it-or-leave it affair and he appeared not to care either way. It reminded me of the Harley-Davidson dealerships I visited in the 1990s9.
They didn’t even ask for our contact information, a really bad sign. It was time to go.
“Thank you for your time,” I said.
On the way out, we took another look at the Super Cub, so sad with its battery panel off and charger nearby. I was tempted to buy it anyway, just to rescue it from Mr. KillJoy. We didn’t, of course.
Leaving it behind.
So we left that beautiful little bike behind but dreams die hard.
What’ll probably happen is I’ll go back and inquire about a reasonable price and Mr. KillJoy won’t budge and I’ll get pissed off and either rationalize away the Super Cub or look for it elsewhere.
Or look for something else. The Royal Enfield Himalayan, 400cc, is genuinely interesting. And Go Little Himalayan could be a catchy tune.
***
1 – Though I really don’t ride mine off-road. They are big, comfortable and powerful, though.
2 – Yes, five: Linda’s 2007 Yamaha Vino 125; her 2020 Vespa GTS 300 Super HPE; Endurance, my 2000 BMW R1150 GS; Terra Nova, my 2012 Yamaha Super Tenere; and Santiago, my 1965 Honda CA 77, awaiting restoration in the woodworking shed out back.
3 – I really like the Long Way series, but they (and other such on-the-road documentaries) got me to thinking about guys riding high-priced bikes in economically disadvantaged areas, passing through as if people in villages were simply background in a movie. Robert Pirsig talks about the difference between motorcycles and cars while traveling – “…through a car window everything you see is just more TV” – but doesn’t a $700 Shoei helmet and $1,000 Roadcrafter suit have an opposite effect on the people who see you? In both situations, you’re set apart.
4 – I can’t recommend Mr. March strongly enough. He’s funny, wise, witty, adventurous, and a mechanical wizard, just the sort of guy you’d like to ride with. Do go see his site, please.
5 – Which apparently scared the bejeezus out of moviegoers back then. The film really hasn’t aged well.
6 – In a move that was breathtaking for its crass commercialization, they actually created a music group, named them the Hondells, and had them sing about Hondas and motorcycles and such. Their first album Go Little Honda was motorcycle-related and though Little Honda is fun and bouncy and gets stuck in your head, the other songs soon get on your nerves after a while. Their second album, released about 20 minutes later, was imaginatively titled The Hondells. I’ve yet to hear it.
7 – We’re talking about a motorbike with small engine, about the size of a loaf of good bread, a single-cylinder affair that makes 9-10 horsepower on a good day. That’s on a par with Linda’s Vino scooter. Terra Nova, by comparison, has about 108 hp.
8 – Actually not his real name.
9 – Oh, those guys were awful. Harleys were selling like crazy back then – there were actual waiting lists – and dealers were copping attitudes like you were lucky they let you in the door. There were stories of dealerships jacking up profit margins by making you buy overpriced accessories before they’d sell you a bike. It was that attitude that drove me elsewhere, to BMW as it turned out. I bought Endurance brand-new in 2000 at Sierra BMW in Sparks, Nevada. Now that’s a great dealership.
Tuesday, Sept. 8 | 36 Days Before: Some of our best moments on motorcycles are encounters with bike riders and nonriders – the former who share their stories and the latter who ask, “What’s it like?” to ride a motorcycle.
Both are great to talk to1, but riders are my favorites. You get gifts of revered memories and sometimes even a glimpse of a far-away place, a shadow of road fatigue, or ghost of a frosty night.
Cove Point Lighthouse, Lusby, Maryland.
This was a mission-prep day. We needed riding time to break in the new Vespa and ended up meandering around coastal Maryland to see a few Chesapeake Bay lighthouses. It was Linda’s idea and they were actually pretty interesting.
The Best Peter Fonda Story I Ever Heard was at the Calvert Marine Museum in Solomons, Maryland, a fascinating place even if you’re not into lighthouses and boats and the sea2.
We’d stumbled out of the museum carrying our helmets and jackets and riding gear and had commandeered3 an outside picnic table to write postcards4 to friends. We spread everything out across the table.
Peter Fonda in 2009.
That’s when Joe, the lead grounds keeper at the museum, stopped by. He’d seen the Vespa and Terra Nova parked outside and our riding gear strewn about the table. He asked about our bikes and of course we started talking about motorcycles.
He was a long-distance Harley rider and a true raconteur5, a great storyteller, and among the stories he told us was this:
He’d been at a motorcycle rally in Daytona, Florida, with his girlfriend Nanette. They had their pictures taken with Easy Rider actor Peter Fonda, paying $5 each for a charity donation.
About five months later, Joe is putting gas in his Harley at a gas station in Montana. He’s been riding two-up with Nanette, who’s in the store.
While she’s inside, Joe sees Peter Fonda pull up on his own bike and start fueling up. It’s not that big of a surprise, Joe tells us, because he knew Fonda owned a house in that part of Montana.
Joe goes over to Fonda, says hello, mentions their brief meeting in Daytona and asks a favor.
“When Nanette comes out, make like you remember her,” he says. Fonda just smiles and says okay6.
Joe goes back to his bike and Nanette returns. Joe motions over to Fonda and says, “I’m pretty sure that’s Peter Fonda. Why don’t you go over and say hello?”
Fonda in Easy Rider.
So Nanette walks over, hesitantly, and Peter Fonda looks at her and says “NANETTE! How are you?” And Nanette’s jaw hits the ground.
During the whole ride home, Joe says, Nanette was excitedly pummeling his ribs and saying, “He remembered me! He actually remembered me!”
3 – Since no one was around, it wasn’t really an act of piracy.
4 – These weren’t notes from a momentous journey, since we were only 80 miles from home. But it’s never a mistake to let people know you care about them. Besides, the cards were nice. I’ve heard that few people send postcards these days, what with email and Instagram and so on. But we still do.
5 – From the French term raconter, which means “to recount.”
6 – I just can see Peter Fonda smiling at the idea. I’ve seen Easy Rider, of course, and Ulee’s Gold, in which he was great and deserved the Academy Award for Best Actor, and read his autobiography Don’t Tell Dadand watched him on Ride With Norman Reedus. He always seemed like a stand-up guy, a genuine good person who rejected being a Hollywood stereotype. And he loved motorcycles. I’m sorry to say he died on Aug. 16, 2019.
Joe told us about a few of his other epic rides and I practically begged him to start his own motorcycle blog. He’d be great.
“You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.”
– C.S. Lewis
Saturday, Nov. 21 | 21 Days Later: Let’s cut to the chase: The crew at Scoot Richmond say the Vespa’s oil loss came from its breaking-in period, not because of some deeper engine problem. A top-end overhaul isn’t needed.
Ambivalence carried the day. “Are you sure?” is what I asked, since we – that is, I – had thrown away the St. Petersburg ride on what I thought was an engine malfunction. Did we just have to add some oil and keep going?
A boring recap: We left home for St. Pete on Oct. 14, rode about 400 miles in two days1 and suffered significant engine oil loss, about a pint, in Wallace, South Carolina, on Oct. 15.
I replaced the oil and we trucked the scooter back to Richmond, arriving on Oct. 29. They checked the oil level, found it was good, no leaks, and told us to put 500 miles more on it.
Back at Scoot Richmond.
We picked it up on Nov. 7 and put 490 miles on2 over the next two weeks, returning on Nov. 21. They checked the oil and it was okay.
Scoot Richmond, I should note, was very supportive throughout all of this. I have no reason to doubt them.
The theory is this: Most engines suffer some oil loss during their break-in periods3. It takes about 2,500 miles for a Vespa to break in. Linda’s Vespa has less than 2,200. So we lost the oil during the break-in to Wallace but didn’t lose any more during the 490-mile test.
Check the oil.
“Just keep an eye on it,” the service guy says. “If you have a problem, you’re still under warranty.”
And that…was that. We rode the 103 miles home and I checked the oil the next day and it was fine.
Talk about an anticlimactic ending. It’s tough to watch your cherished yearly ride get sucked away like precious water spilled on desert sand, but at least I learned to be more vigilant about checking the oil and knowing more about the bike. I just wish the lesson weren’t so costly.
***
1 – Yes, that’s a rather leisurely pace but it’s still fun.
2 – In two trips on two weekends, one to Gordonsville, Virginia, the other to Poolesville, Maryland, for the historic White’s Ferry. Both rides turned out really nice.
3 – Assuming you’re unfamiliar with engines (not that I am, of course, as these events testify) that’s the number of miles you have to ride the bike in order to smoothly wear in engine parts such as pistons and valves.
The guy at Home Depot said: “Are you sure you’ve got enough straps?”
“And so it ended, except in my mind, which changed the events more deeply into what they were, into what they meant to me alone.”
– James Dickey, “Deliverance”
Saturday, Nov. 7 | Seven Days Later: After too many days and too many miles in the back of a rental truck, we got the Vespa from the mechanical medics at Scoot Richmond and rode it home.
We’d left it there Oct. 291 on the way back from St. Pete. The diagnosis is: (1) We overfilled the gas tank on Day 2 in Wallace, South Carolina, and temporarily fubared the EVAP system2, and (2) The engine may have a pre-existing problem from the factory which requires a top-end overhaul3.
Oy vey. In the days since returning home, post-mission analysis confirms the overfill was our fault, but probability is high we could have continued riding after the fuel had evaporated from the EVAP system’s charcoal canister. That would have taken some time, perhaps overnight.
Retrieval of the Vespa on Nov. 7.
The oil loss, however, is a different matter. There was no leak but the scooter simply should not have been be using that much oil in that short amount of time. Some other Vespas with the HPE4 have been reported with similar oil consumption problems.
So Scoot Richmond will take a look, under warranty. Per their instructions, we took the Vespa home, put 500 miles on it, and will return it to them on Saturday for their inspection.
Sorting things out after getting Terra Nova home. Friend, neighbor and riding buddy Bob Hamilton was a great help this day.
All this is a boring and anticlimatic ending to a disappointing ride, motorcycle-wise, but I was grateful anyway. We’d emerged from the cloud of uncertainty that overshadowed the entire trip, with a few sleepless nights for me worrying how I was going to get the bikes in and out of the rental truck.
At about 370 pounds, the Vespa didn’t worry me. The Yamaha, at 575, did.
Part of it was YouTube disaster videos of guys riding their motorcycles up ramps and falling off. Here, this will give you an idea; go full-frame for the best effect.
In Wallace, there was no one around to lend a hand. The truck ramp was 10 feet long and about 26 inches wide. The cargo deck was 33 inches from the ground. I found a place where the ground sloped upward that reduced the ramp angle.
That was better, but it took me longer than I’d like to admit5 to work up the nerve to ride Terra Nova up that damned ramp and into the truck.
That got us over the peak, as they say. Linda and I push-pulled the Vespa up the ramp and we were able to use Home Depot tie-downs6 to secure both bikes upright in the truck. I checked them every time we stopped.
The ramp.
After that, it was a matter of just driving home.
Driving home. Usually I’d be brooding over the loss of a motorcycle trip, but the relief after loading the Yamaha stayed with me on the highways into Virginia.
It was kinda like the successful failure of Apollo 13, I reasoned; Linda and I may have lost the ride, but we still had each other, we were safe, the bikes were secure, we’d had a good time in St. Pete, and the Vespa would be fixed to ride another day. And we will ride another day.
***
1 – The official end of the mission, I reckon.
2 – EVAP is shorthand for Evaporative Emission Control System, which closes the vehicle’s fuel system to prevent gasoline vapors from the tank and fuel system from escaping into the atmosphere. Overfilling the tank can cause fuel to enter the EVAP’s charcoal canister which, on the Vespa, causes a stalling/starting problem until the fuel is cleared from the canister.
3 – A top-end overhaul involves taking the engine apart and replacing a number of parts, which could include piston rings, the piston itself (Vespas are single-cylinder engines) and valves. As you might guess, that’s a lot of work.
4 – High Peformance Engine.
5 – It really did. No one likes to admit he’s a wuss, but I was genuinely scared silly that I’d fudge it up somehow and take a tumble.
6 – Four tie-downs on each bike, which may have been overkill, but I had more to make sure they wouldn’t fall over. In addition to those stupid YouTube videos, I was haunted by the experience a relative had while taking his bikes back home to California from Florida in 2003; the bikes weren’t properly secured and ended up falling over inside the truck. I didn’t want that to happen to us.
Note to Jack Kerouac that someone left in the screen door a few years ago.
From the mission archivist: This is probably a better anecdote for house hunters and Kerouac readers than motorcycle travelers, so feel free to skip if you’re so inclined. You’re forgiven in advance, so go in peace.
***
Sunday, Oct. 18 | Day 5: Beat Generation author Jack Kerouac died in St. Petersburg in 1969 at age 47, leaving behind a substantial body of work, his novel On the Road that influenced generations of readers, and a house on 10th Avenue North that you wouldn’t look at twice unless you knew he’d lived there.
I’m a Kerouac aficionado (certainly not a scholar) and we’ve stopped by this house at 5169 10th Ave. nearly every year we’ve been coming to St. Pete.
Last year, and…
Why that is, I can’t rightly say; we feel the need to pay respects to those we admire1, including writers whose words make you see the world differently.
…this year.
That sentiment has been shared over decades by other Kerouac fans, who visit the house and put short, heartfelt notes in the mailbox and screen door. I’ve seen some of them myself, like the one pictured above.
And now, on this St. Pete motorcycle ride (suddenly without motorcycles2) I discover Kerouac’s house has been renovated and is for sale.
The kitchen.
An open house is scheduled for Saturday, the day we arrive, and again on Sunday, the next day. The coincidental timing is too perfect to ignore, so we decide to go.
“Are you here for the house or the history?” asks the real estate agent3 when we arrive. It’s a legitimate question and we say both, because we’ve entertained thoughts of moving to the St. Pete area in a few years.
Cabinet handles.
But mainly I want to see the inside of Kerouac’s house, renovated and sanitized and HGTV-ready though it may be. I also feel duty-bound to take as many pictures as I can for my best friend Van Yasek, who introduced me to Kerouac and deserves a full report.
Inside the front door.
Most of the visitors are not here for history, it appears. We talk to a few while waiting outside and they confirm they’re house hunting.
“Oh, we’re here for the house,” a young woman says. “This is a nice area and we’re looking to buy.” The won’t-you-please-sign-in guestbook echoes a similar theme.
Master bedroom.
Kerouac lived here with Stella, his third wife, and Gabrielle, his invalid mother. He was reportedly working on a novel about his father’s print shop in Lowell, Massachusetts, at the time of his death.
Gabrielle died in 1973 and Stella died in 1990, in Lowell. The home had been in stasis since then.
A St. Pete-based nonprofit group hoped to buy the house and turn it into a writer’s retreat4 but was unable to reach an agreement5 with Kerouac’s in-laws, the owners. It was sold this year to Flip Side, LLC, a house flipper, and is now on the market for $350,000.
Small dining room.
Inside – at last! – we see the sellers have taken care to acknowledge Kerouac’s presence while touting the house as a nice place to live.
It’s still a bizarre coupling of two worlds; inspecting the interior, I feel as if I’m in a TV show that’s a cross between Flip or Flop and House on Haunted Hill6.
Some items are labeled “Pending certification from the estate of Jack Kerouac” which presumably means the estate will determine if Kerouac actually used it. Most of the furniture has been moved out over the years, including Kerouac’s iconic desk, which was exhibited at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell.
Large dining room.
“The house was in pretty bad shape,” the real estate agent says, and lists the repairs: a new roof, new HVAC system, wall paint, and deep cleaning. The outside walkway has been replaced for greater curb appeal.
She also says the renovators saved the original interior whenever possible. In the kitchen, “the appliances are the same and cabinets are, too. The door handles are original.”
Bookshelves, choice of books probably based on conjecture.
Everyone comments on the terrazzo floors7, which sparkle throughout the house. “Oh, yes, they did a great job polishing the floor,” the agent says. Even I’m impressed.
We take our time walking around, looking at rooms, noting the cedar closets and 1960s-era wallpaper and wondering what books Kerouac had in the built-in bookcase.
Screened-in back porch.
The house does look good and it’s fascinating to see the inside, though I feel like a bit of a voyeur looking at everything, taking in details like door handles and wallpaper.
However, I can’t forget the utter sadness of Kerouac’s last years. He didn’t really want to move to St. Petersburg – he called it “a good place to come die” – but the climate was better for his mother, paralyzed after a stroke.
Living room.
He was brutalized by the unexpected celebrity that sprang up after On the Road, his seminal work8, was published in 1957.
That book and the later writings of Kerouac and others created what came to be known as the Beat Generation9 (whose members questioned and rejected middle-class values and were later belittled and marginalized as beatniks). Kerouac became known as King of the Beats, a title he didn’t like and refused to accept.
One of the two spare bedrooms.
Kerouac was an alcoholic for much of his life. He died at nearby St. Anthony’s Hospital in St. Petersburg of an internal hemorrhage caused by cirrhosis. His funeral was held at St. Jean Baptiste Church in Lowell, where he once served as an altar boy.
Someone, probably soon, will buy the house at 5169 10th Avenue North. They may be mindful of its famous occupant and integrate his memory into their new home, but that’s doubtful. After all, one can’t truly live in a museum; anyone who buys a house wants to make it their own. I understand that.
Bathroom wallpaper.
But the American way, the method of living shunned by the Beat Generation – the same attitude that propels us to rush ahead, forget the past, tear out what we should pause to appreciate, and calculate the quick profit – will likely prevail.
I’m thankful to have seen Kerouac’s house, but I’m certain that, when we come here again next year, I’ll look at it, see what the new owners have done, and think: We’ve all blown it again.
Addendum: Maybe It Will Be Okay
The Tampa Bay Times reports the house has been sold to a couple who want to preserve its history and open it to the public, either as a writer’s retreat or a place for literary events.
This comes as a surprise to me and I’m very glad to hear it. Perhaps it will work out after all.
***
1 – We’ve also visited the Jack Kerouac Park in Lowell, Massachusetts, where he grew up, and his gravesite in Edson Cemetery in Lowell.
2 – Since our motorcycles are parked in Wallace, South Carolina, 570 miles from here.
3 – Whose daughter was evidently staving off boredom on the sofa with her smartphone.
4 – A different nonprofit, The Kerouac Project, had success in Orlando, Florida, where they transformed one of Kerouac’s former houses – the one in which he wrote Dharma Bums – into a writer’s haven.
5 – I am sorry this did not come to pass. We attended one of their fundraisers last year and I was impressed by their vision and sincerity. The Tampa Bay Times said the Flip Side owner bought it partly because it was Kerouac’s retirement home, but mostly because he considers “it in a real up-and-coming neighborhood.”
6 – The 1959 classic film with Vincent Price, Richard Long and Carol Ohmart, of course.
7 – Terrazzo floors are a near-liquid composite of marble, quartz, glass and other material and are poured, smoothed out, and allowed to dry. It has a reputation for durability.
8 – I really like On the Road but prefer the original scroll version.
9 – Beat, as in “beat down” but also as in “beatific.”
Thursday, Oct. 15 | Day 2: The day begins with a cryptic communique from work on my smartphone, a harbinger of changes to come, employment-wise; it throws a heavy shadow over the morning and kicks my focus off the ride for a while.
We pack up the bikes as I laborously exchange emails with trusted colleagues until I’m convinced the changes can be handled. We set course for Orangeburg, South Carolina, a 227-mile chunk of travel that will put us within arm’s reach of Georgia tonight and touchdown in St. Pete Beach, Florida, 40 hours from then.
With its 2.2-gallon fuel tank, Linda’s Vespa decides when we pause for gas. I refuel when she does, though it means putting about three gallons into Terra Nova each time we stop1. As on other rides, we develop a rhythm that works.
Mr. Locke and his Tiger.
The rhythm has us stop 30 miles later at an Exxon station2 in Moncure, North Carolina, where I see a guy on an older Triumph Tiger, an adventure-style motorcycle like Terra Nova.
I admire Triumphs of all eras but Tigers are special. I came close to getting a Triumph before deciding on the Yamaha, a Super Tenere, in 2012.
I examine the Tiger until the owner emerges from the station and I introduce myself. He’s Jack Locke, from Sanford, North Carolina, not far from here. What year is the bike? How many miles does it have? I ask.
“It’s a 2002 Triumph, with 162,000 miles,” he says, proudly. “And I put them all on myself.”
He’s a disaster-aid assessor for the Red Cross and has piloted that Triumph around the country. We walk around the Tiger and he points out modifications he’s made over the years, including turn signals held in place with duct tape (“someone kept breaking them off”) and other upgrades he’s done himself.
Details on the fuel tank.
He tells us about a divorce – “she said ‘it’s either that bike or me’ and I said, well, good luck,” and listening to his travels, I’m fascinated and urge him to write about them3.
We wish each other safe travels and as Linda and I wheel away, I realize we’ve had one of those on-the-road encounters that are gifts for motorcycle travelers.
This is one of the reasons why we’re out here and my spirits lift from the hasty emails of the morning. We’re living our own lives now.
We eventually cross over into South Carolina and pull into a Shell station in Wallace, which is not much more than a crossroads of three gas stations and a few other buildings, from what I can see.
I can’t resist getting out the phone again and checking email, exchanging a few texts with a colleague. Everything’s well enough there.
Daylight starts to fade as we motor away from the gas station and pause at the red light on U.S. 1. The Vespa stalls.
Terra Nova and I wait behind Linda as she hits the starter button. The Vespa starts but stalls again.
“Shut off the key and do a hard restart,” I say. It doesn’t help.
Fortunately, there’s no southbound traffic behind us. I move the Yamaha to the curb and she does the same with the scooter. I try starting the Vespa myself. No luck.
“We can’t stay here,” I say. “I’ll push it to the station.”
The intersection of U.S. 1 and South Carolina State Route 9.
The Vespa is relatively light and easy to manuever. I walk it back to the parking lot, off to the side. Linda waits with the scooter while I fetch the Yamaha.
I pull the bags off both bikes and get a flashlight, tools and rags. I check the oil; the dipstick is nearly dry. That’s bad, really bad.
How could we lose so much oil in so few miles? Granted, I hadn’t checked it that morning, but we’ve come about 400 miles in two days, not many for a brand-new vehicle.
It’s dark now and I’m crawling around on filthy asphalt. I look for leaks; nothing there. I have spare quarts of engine oil for both bikes4 and I carefully, carefully top off the Vespa5. It takes about a half quart to register full on the dipstick.
I try the starter. This time the engine runs, but unevenly. It doesn’t want to idle and sounds rough even in a run-up to full throttle.
By this time, I’m running out of ideas, only knowing this: There’s a problem with the engine; it’s probably oil-related; I don’t think I can fix it, at least tonight.
And the closest Vespa dealer, with mechanics, diagnostic computers and spare parts, is in Savannah, Georgia, 200 miles from here.
1 – The Vespa gets better gas mileage than the Yamaha, though the latter’s gas tank is much larger, about six gallons.
2 – The Jordan Dam Mini-Mart.
3 – Seriously. I think some people quietly lead lives that are substantially more interesting than most, and Mr. Locke is one of them.
4 – Castrol Power 1, 5W-40, full synthetic.
5 – Using a long, narrow funnel I bought at a Harley-Davidson dealer in Maryville, Tennessee. Vespas are beautiful but quirky machines that need funnels of an special shape that can reach through the crash bars to add oil – a procedure that’s frustrating in the dark, even with a headlamp.
Thursday, Oct. 15 | Day 2: With a Vespa we can’t fix in a lonely, remote gas station parking lot, we consider our options, like JFK’s EXCOMM during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis1.
We can’t run the scooter because it may screw up the engine even more and maroon us in an even more inhospitable place.
A towing service isn’t available – I ask the gas station clerks and they say there’s one tow truck driver in town and he stops working at night2.
The Vespa will have to stay here tonight. Linda finds a room three miles away at the Baymont Inn in Cheraw, South Carolina. She stays with the scooter while I take Terra Nova to Cheraw to secure the room and drop off our bags.
From the mission linguist: Cheraw is pronounced Shuh-RAH, with accent on the second syllable, not Chair-Rah. (We were mystified, too.)
I return to fetch her and we put the black Dow cover over the Vespa, making it less of a theft target. We go back to our room and end up walking over to a convenience store for a late-night dinner3 – two small cans of Beefaroni for me.
The Baymont Inn, with super-nice folks.
We try and decide what to do. We’ve paid for 10 days at a condo in St. Pete Beach and won’t be refunded for days we’re not there. So we need to get going.
We could ride two-up on the Yamaha but it’ll be overloaded and really uncomfortable and we have lots of miles to go.
We could get a rental truck and take both bikes to St. Pete and drop off the Vespa at a dealer for repair. But I don’t have faith the Vespa can be fixed in time for us to go home, especially if some exotic parts have to be ordered from Italy or someplace. Or if the engine needs major work.
In the rainy morning, after an uneasy sleep, I suggest this: We store both bikes here and rent a car to drive to St. Pete. On the way back, we’ll get a rental truck and take both bikes home, dropping off the Vespa at Scoot Richmond for repair.
That way, we only have to travel to Richmond, 100 miles from home, instead of mounting some super-expedition to retrieve the Vespa from Florida or Savannah.
Linda agrees this makes sense so I start calling for towing and storage and she looks for a car to rent. Her first discovery is that the Enterprise rental in Cheraw is closed permanently because of the coronavirus. She starts searching elsewhere.
The first storage place I call says they’re full up.
The second place has space but doesn’t accept motorcycles or vehicles. “We really discourage them,” the guy says. “Oil could leak, gas could be a fire hazard…”
The third place has space and will take bikes. I reserve a space, though we’re not quite clear on its location. Google Maps is vague.
Then I call the we-don’t-tow-at-night towing service and speak with a woman who says they can help. She calls back 10 minutes later.
“I talked with our driver and he doesn’t want to do it. He’s afraid the bike will get damaged.”
I say we’ve done this before4 and tell her I’ll secure the scooter myself and absolve them of responsibility.
“No, we can’t do that,” she says. “I’m sorry.”
Well, is there another towing service?
“No, not really,” she says and I grit my teeth and say thank-you and good-bye and refrain from throwing my phone across the motel parking lot. I’ll push the damn thing theremyself is what I’m thinking.
But then we start getting some breaks.
Fortunately, it wasn’t far at all.
The Baymont Inn folks very kindly allow us to pile all our baggage in the vacant lobby while we take the Yamaha to look for the storage space and rent a car.
We check on the Vespa and find it unmolested at the Shell station.
Then we cruise down South Carolina 9, past the Dollar General, looking for the storage place. I’m thinking I’ll have to push the Vespa a half-mile, maybe more.
But we can’t find it. I turn around at the elementary school and head back to Shell station, and suddenly we see the place near the Shell station. It’s within easy walking distance, maybe a football field’s length away.
The nice woman behind the counter – unlike a few others we’ve encountered that morning – makes it so easy. We pay for the space, get a lock, and I push the Vespa over and secure it inside a 10×12 locker.
We ride 20 miles north to Rockingham, North Carolina, to get the rental car Linda has found, a white Hyundai. We go back, park the Yamaha beside the Vespa and lock the door. Then we fetch our bags, profusely thank the nice woman at the Baymont Inn and finally, finally, leave around 4 p.m.
We did get to where we wanted to be.
The vacation is still on, but our problems are not over. I reserve a rental truck for the bikes but I’m not yet sure how to get them up the ramp – it’s kinda steep5. I’ll have to be careful while strapping them down inside.
But I look at all our motorcycle gear suddenly turned useless and unnecessary, the helmets, jackets, boots, gloves, rain gear and I feel another loss, like last year. Maybe we’ll try again next year. And check the oil more often.
***
1 – That may be a bit of a reach, but I love reading history and Kennedy’s Executive Committee advisers didn’t want to make a decision that made things worse. That’s what I was thinking: Let’s not make this worse.
2 – Perhaps he engages in towing as an occasional hobby.
3 – Food options were limited at that point.
4 – It’s true. It was in Zephyrhills, Florida, in 2003, when my uncle’s 1976 Honda Goldwing refused to run. A guy with a flatbed tow truck came out and transported it to a repair shop that ended up not repairing it. Both his motorcycle and my aunt’s went back to San Diego in the back of a U-Haul truck, our Inskip Odyssey aborted, one of the great sorrows of my life.
5 – I’ve seen too many YouTube videos of guys messing up and having their motorcycles fall off ramps while riding them up into trucks. I’ll have to be careful.
Friday, Oct. 23 | Day 10: The markers for my grandparents look about the same as last year, though the grass has started encroaching on the granite. I use the shears we’d brought for the flower stems to cut back the grass, trim it down.
We’ve been stopping here every year since we started coming to St. Pete Beach, taking one day to drive up to Zephyrhills to see the site of their old house and pay our respects here.
And even though the motorcycle ride has gone south, we’re here. We trim the grass and clean off the markers and put fresh flowers and water in the vase. Purple was her favorite color.
One time I noticed the date plate on my grandmother’s side had come loose; I removed it, using the Phillips screwdriver on a Leatherman, and reinstalled it using a bit of Locktite blue hastily bought from an AutoZone store down the road. Today, the plate is still firmly in place.
My grandfather probably would not have thought much of the flowers, but my grandmother would like them.
As usual, we don’t stay very long. The work is minimal and it takes only minutes to shoot a few photos that I send to faraway relatives to let them know all is well here.
Wednesday, Oct. 14 | Day 1: As usual, we start much later than anticipated and as usual it was my fault and I don’t know why, except I took too much time trying to design an interior support for the three – yes, three – laptops1 we were hauling inside a 1520 Pelican case.
We both have an irritating yet enduring problem with packing light, perhaps a lack of mission resolve, as the British would say. I take too many tools and probably too many clothes, though I did trim back the number of books this year2.
But we finally roll away a little before 5 p.m. and crazy stuff starts happening about an hour later.
Linda unexpectedly stops her Vespa on the left shoulder of a divided four-lane state highway in rural Virginia, forcing me to overshoot and stop ahead of her, parking Terra Nova literally inches from cars racing past.
Sidestand down, I jog back and ask what the hell is going on.
It’s a dog that was trying to cross the road and was hit by a semi. It happened literally in front of Linda, and the truck kept going without hesitation. The poor dog is on its side in the tall grass of the median.
Some other guy appears, a nearby resident, I think. He has a cellphone in his hand and looks on as I kneel beside the dog, a white pit-bull-type terrier, young, about 25 lbs. He is unmarked, but most assuredly dead. He has a chain collar but I can’t find a name tag.
Another guy in a pickup truck stops, asks if we’re okay, and we try to explain what happened. There doesn’t seem to be much concern for the dog on their part. The pickup truck guy leaves and we ask the cellphone resident if he can call someone to get the dog, but he appears to not quite understand what we’re saying.
Fueling up before reaching Raleigh, North Carolina.
There isn’t much else we can do and it’s getting even later and we’re both tired with miles to go. So we leave, figuring we can call the sheriff’s office or someone after reaching the hotel.
The dog, of course, follows us for the rest of the night. We have three dogs of our own3, one of them literally rescued by us on I-95 two years ago, so the terrier’s death haunts us, especially Linda.
We stop for gas at about 8 p.m. at a Sheetz station in Orange, Virginia, both of us tired and hungry. With the coronavirus still raging across the country, we’d decided to stay away from indoor restaurants and end up getting sandwiches and such at the station.
The outdoor seating is vacant and fenced off, so the base of a lamp post becomes an impromptu table. We eat standing up in the parking lot.
And we press on after that, through an empty Gordonsville, Virginia, on U.S. 15, deserted at this late hour but wonderfully lit up with white lights hung in Main Street sidewalk trees, a marvelous, warming effect.
It’s colder than we expected so we add extra layers4 and move along a series of dark county roads, wisps of Halloween fog rising and passing around us. The new light bar on Linda’s Vespa really brightens up the back of her scooter; watching it ahead, I’m glad I installed it.
The gas pumps were open, but everything else was emphatically closed.
After fueling at one of most locked-up Exxon stations I’ve ever seen – more like Attica than a rural gas station – we shut down the bikes a little after 1 a.m. at the hotel outside of Raleigh, North Carolina.
We’re now really tired and beat. We take the bags upstairs, put the covers on the motorcycles, and, about 280 miles and too many hours from home, go to bed.
***
1 – We usually each carry a work computer in case news breaks (I put in a few hours when George H.W. Bush died in 2018) and she needed a second computer for her online Hungarian class.
2 – One paperback, “Rice and Dirt,” about a couple riding through Africa on a Vespa, and my usual 8×5 Moleskine notebook.
3 – They are: Cody, an 11-year-old Shetland sheepdog; Remy, a 7-year-old border collie; and Skipper, a 5-year-old treeing Walker coonhound, the one we found along the highway.
Linda’s Vespa was brand-new, so some pre-mission upgrades naturally had to be made, specifically the brake lights and forward running lights. We’d be moving at night and I wanted (1) the scooter to be as conspicuous as possible in the dark, and (2) more lighting for the road ahead.
The replacement front turn signals provide more light. Cody is ready to help.
That meant more mail-order stuff from scooterwest.com and clearing out my tiny workshop1 at Starbase 8 to wedge the Vespa inside. It also required protecting the scoot from our curious cats2 by covering it with enough old towels to resemble a ghost in a Bowery Boys movie.
As Sunny demonstrates here.
I’d upwired enough accessories on her 2010 Vespa for bad memories to linger. I find Italian scoots rather difficult to work on, with tight spaces and overly complex hardware.
The headache started after the AdMore light bar arrived; the wiring harness was too short for our model and I had to order a two-foot extension. And then I had to learn how to solder the wires3 together.
But, over a few days, I eventually figured it out, got all the lights and bodywork installed, and felt better afterwards. I finally wheeled the Vespa out of the workshop, leaving a space that reminded me of the Time Machine’s departure4:
The Time Traveller was not there. I seemed to see a ghostly, indistinct figure sitting in a whirling mass of black and brass for a moment — a figure so transparent that the bench behind with its sheets of drawings was absolutely distinct; but this phantasm vanished as I rubbed my eyes. The Time Machine had gone.
***
1 – About 7 feet wide x 14 feet deep, I reckon, or roughly the size of three phone booths combined.
2 – Lexi, especially. He’s the black-and-white cat we rescued from the Dollar General in Ohio in 2008 while traveling aboard Endurance. He’s developed an affinity for lounging on the saddles of all our motorcycles and scooters.
3 – The harness contained six wires, all 26-gauge, which is pretty thin and challenging to work with. I had to get a proper soldering iron, the correct 60-40 lead/tin solder, paste and heat-shrink tubing, and watch about 400 YouTube videos to learn how to do it.
4 – From the 1895 H.G. Wells novel, The Time Machine. The narrator reaches the workshop just in time to see the machine vanish, leaving a poignant space behind.
“I worried over that blunder for an hour, and called myself a great many hard names, meantime.”
– Samuel Clemens, “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court”
Here’s one I’ll never forget: While mounting the rear luggage rack, I managed to drive two bolts into the plastic gas tank of Linda’s Vespa.
It was both the simplest and greatest piece of mechanical idiocy I’ve ever done; I simply took the wrong bolts and unmindfully began screwing them into the threaded holes in the rear panel. They were metric M6 bolts, same diameter and thread count, just twice as long as needed.
Tools of destruction.
I’m spinning them in by hand with an Allen wrench. They go in smoothly at first, then start to balk. I try a little more force, then back off and unscrew both.
That’s when I realize I’m using too-long bolts, precipitating one of those anguished head-in-your-hands moments of oh, sweet Jesus, I can’t believe this. I thought I was using the right ones. We’ve had her scooter a week and I’ve already ruined it.
That’s Robot of Vespa Motorsports/Scooter West on the upper left screen. Despite his advice…
I’d even been warned about it; I’d watched the Vespa Motorsport video on luggage rack installation1 and Robot2 mentions it at 6:38 into the video. “Had people put too long of a screw in there and puncture the gas tank, not a good thing,” he says. Oh, sweet Jesus.
It’s times like these you have to talk yourself off the ledge and I think about the passage in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in which author Robert Pirsig mentions an instruction sheet for putting together a bicycle.
“Assembly of Japanese bicycle require great peace of mind,” say the instructions, and Pirsig goes on about peace of mind and says “If you don’t have this when you start and maintain it while you’re working, you’re likely to build your personal problems right into the machine itself.”
The windscreen was not part of this fiasco. I just thought I should mention that.
It wasn’t a lack of serenity that caused the mistake; I simply picked up the wrong bolts. But maybe serenity includes acting properly within the moment, which I certainly was not doing.
So after a lengthy period of critically severe self-beratement, I move from Self Destruct to Damage Control mode and start to assess how bad it is. The gas level is low, so it’s not possible to check for leaks yet, but there’s no smell of fuel from the threaded holes.
I run a hand-held mechanic’s light on a flexible tube up inside the back fenders but see nothing. (I do relearn that Vespa buttons up everything very tight on its scooters and it’s impossible to get your hand around the tank, or even get a good view of it.) So I can’t feel or see what I did.
The fuel tank, depicted in ‘sea green,’ like the Crayola crayon we had back in the first grade.
But I can shine the light down into the holes and see new thread lines scored into the plastic below. Online views of the fuel tank show the back is sculpted like a valley, so it appears I’ve cut a little into the valley walls, instead of boring directly into the tank itself.
I take one of Tera Nova’s reserve fuel bottles and fill the Vespa’s tank to the brim of the filler tube. And wait. No leaks.
That was on Aug. 18.
A stop in Port Royal, Virginia, on the road to Deltaville.
On Aug. 22, we ride out toward Deltaville, Virginia, as part-tank-test, part-get-the-mileage-up-to-600 for the service. Aside from the rain, everything is okay.
And finally, we take the Vespa back to Scoot Richmond on Saturday, Aug. 29, for the 600-mile work and ask the mechanics to check.
Stopping for fuel, shaking off rainwater. That’s Terra Nova on the left and Linda’s Vespa between it and Linda on the right.
It’s impractical for them to remove the tank on the day we’re there – it’s a three-hour job, like most things Vespa – but they say they couldn’t see any leaks. “And since you haven’t seen anything, it’s probably okay,” says one. “Just keep an eye on it.”
I’m afraid I’ll do much more than that. I’ll be consumed, obsessed, haunted by it and I’ll carry the concern like Quasimodo’s hump. Maybe a new gas tank, installed in the fall, will restore my peace of mind.
1 – Vespa Motorsports how-to videos are top-notch, in my opinion.
2020 on the left, 2010 on the right. Both red, of course.
So Linda hit the commit button and traded in her 2010 300cc Vespa for a 2020 Vespa; same style, same engine size, almost the same daring shade of red, you can’t hardly tell them apart. We brought the new scooter home from Scoot Richmond on Saturday.
What’s different is that the new bike has anti-lock brakes and traction control, making it a safer machine than its 10-year-old mate. It also has what Vespa calls HPE, a High Performance Engine that offers a little more horsepower than the old 300.
I doubt the sign was much of a deterrent to a dedicated fondler.
“Have you ridden her bike?” the young woman armed with Scoot Richmond’s financial paperwork asks me. “You’ll have to try this new one, you’ll really feel a difference.”
Linda and I had talked about her trading up to a new Vespa, especially when the company was reportedly planning to build a new 350cc model. Since we were doing more long-distance travel, we wanted that extra horsepower.
And I really wanted her to have a machine with ABS. She was amenable to all that, but in red, of course1.
Alas, Vespa scuttled its 350cc idea2, but my interest was piqued by the new HPE. We started dropping in on Vespa dealers to look at them, and when a red one arrived in Richmond, Va., we got it.
The 2010 Vespa was a really good bike.
We got it for the ABS and the engine, of course, but also because we’ve decided to take the motorcycles to St. Petersburg, Fla., this year as our traditional long-distance ride3.
In this time of coronavirus, it seems to be the best choice, the best compromise between breaking the rule of going someplace new4 and not going anywhere at all. More on that later.
But it was difficult to say good-bye to the 2010 bike, which we’ve had for nearly nine years and more than 14,000 miles. It had its moments, but it never let us down.
I put some effort into upgrading it for her, including a windscreen, brighter headlights and running lights, an exterior power socket for a heated vest, a quarter-sized Formotion thermometer, and flashing hyperlights that really brightened up the stern when she braked.
The sticker has meaning, but only to us.
So there are memories in those parts, and others, like the green sticker put on the windscreen by someone in a Marriott hotel garage in New Orleans in 2017. Terra Nova has one, too.
The 2020 bike will get some of those. I transferred, from old to new, the Hungarian flag5 bolts for the license plate and the Vespa logo valve-stem caps obtained at Modern Classic6 in the District a few years ago. The thermometer migrated over, too.
We got our first taste of the new bike duo on the way home from Richmond, taking U.S. 522 instead of I-95, a good ride through rolling Virginia countryside.
Yes, the third floor.
We stopped at the picturesque deli & grocery7 in Winston, an area best described as a combination of Andy Griffith’s Mayberry and one of those spooky places you photograph, examine later, and discover someone staring down at you from an abandoned third-floor window.
Before the red-haired kid showed up.
We looked around a bit, and then, as we were suiting up to leave, some little red-haired kid came around a corner, forced open a shed door and, in a true Children of the Corn moment, emerged with a sheathed hunting knife the size of a Marine Corps KA-BAR8. He went into the main building and never acknowledged us, or even looked at the Vespa.
New bike, new ride. I’ve already started futzing with the 2020 Vespa; I wonder how many Winstons we’ll see between here and St. Pete.
1 – She loves Vespa red more than the Cookie Monster loves Oreos.
2 – It was something about the inability to upsize the engine and still keep the classic Vespa profile, or some such.
3 – Hence the new mission designation.
4 – This one sort of hurts. We always say we’ll go someplace we haven’t been before, and we’ve been pretty good about that, up to now. At least we’ll see some new places on an untraveled route, since we usually go by air.
5 – They were actually bolts with the Italian flag on them, but if you rotate them 90 degrees counter-clockwise, they become Hungarian.
6 – Modern Classic closed about three months ago, we learned. It wasn’t the coronavirus, but because the owner retired. He’d mentioned to us in 2019 that he was considering it. It was a great shop; we shall miss them.
7 – I assume it’s permanently closed for business, though someone is living there.
8 – Which is an acronym for Knife Attachment-Browning Automatic Rifle. In other words, a good-sized knife.
Since our motorcycle travel plans are in a state of coronavirus-inspired limbo, we’ve been taking some time to work on the Nashville house and naturally I’m making motorcycles a part of it.
We go to Starbase Nashville two or three times a year and had a two-day layover on the ride back from New Orleans in 2017, during which I futzed with Linda’s Vespa in an unsuccessful attempt1 to replace the speedometer cable.
It was nice to have that haven, 780 miles from home. It started me thinking about Nashville as a second home of sorts, or at least a second garage.
“I see a rented power washer in your future.”
The notion comes from my father’s garage, I think. He has a two-car space with a workbench in the back, enough wrenches to overhaul the Queen Mary and machine stuff like power saws and grinders and sanders that make life so much easier. And the knowledge to make them work.
So this week, I went through the two-car garage at the Nashville house and got rid of a lot of unneeded stuff. The goal is to make it a motorcycle-friendly place that can be used as a staging area for future rides.
A certain amount of work will be involved. We had the house foundation re-aligned last year and we’re getting a new roof this year. In the garage itself, there’s some water damage I’ll have to fix, starting with power-washing the affected cinderblocks and sealing them.
I’ll paint the interior white, which will brighten up the place considerably, and put in new lighting. We added a second tool chest today, which will help with organization. Race Deck flooring is on the list.
Other motorcycle brands will be welcome, of course.
I’m still sorting through plans, but one aspect is definite: Linda loves Vespas, so this will be a Vespa-themed garage, with Vespa art and color scheme. Lowe’s offers multi-color metal pegboard, so I’ll get green, white and red panels and make them into an Italian flag across the back wall. ScooterWest offers clocks, tin signs, thermometers and insane loads of other items as décor.
The whole thing is like creative application of art to a functional2 workspace, I suppose. It’s a nice diversion from this horror of coronavirus and the reassuring feeling that I’m actually accomplishing something with my own two hands.
1 – No Vespa dealer in the area had a replacement cable on hand. The part had to be ordered, which I did when we got home.
2 – Emphasis will be on function, of course; I won’t simply tack up Vespa posters everywhere. We’re talking about a comfortable, well-equipped place to work on your motorcycle in a space with a good amount of Vespa visual references.
It would probably be this 2021 GTS 300 HPE Racing Sixties model, with a classic paint scheme of British racing green and yellow – the same as Lotus 7 sports car featured in the 1960s TV series The Prisoner.
From the 1960s British TV show.
We saw this during our first visit to Sloan’s Motorcycle and ATV in Murfreesboro, Tenn., on Thursday. The venture was a respite from work at Starbase Nashville and a chance to look at HPE1 models Linda likes.
So it’s a little pricey.
Sloan’s turned out to be an impressive dealership, with 55,000 square feet of space, roughly the size of NASA’s Vehicle Assembly Building, in motorcycle terms.
The Vespa choices were…um, a lot.
It has a wide selection of bikes (and ATVs) but it’s anchored by Indian Motorcycle, which has a designed floorspace that’s nicer than our living room2.
Kawasaki W800.
Indians are nice, but I was drawn to a Kawasaki W800, a Triumph Bonneville-styled bike, and some of the Moto Guzzi ADV models.
Moto Guzzi V85TT.
Still, the green & yellow Vespa was so perfect, so classy, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I probably won’t get one, but if I did, I’d have to fix up our place to make it worthy of the Vespa’s presence. Maybe I could get some fixer-upper tips from Indian.
1 – Vespa’s largest engine is 300 cubic centimeters, rather small by contemporary motorcycle standards with about 23 hp. The HPE, or High Performance Engine, is a redesigned affair that keeps the same number of ccs but increases output by a few horsepower. They also have anti-lock brakes and traction control.
2 – Seriously. The floors are faux wood, some of the walls are brick, and the furniture looks like it came from an HGTV make-over reveal. All that’s missing is a wood-burning fireplace. It must be some sort of Indian Motorcycle presentation rule; we saw something quite similar at Motorcycles of Dulles in Chantilly, Va., another nice dealership.
We took our second official ride of the year down to Scoot Richmond on Saturday, where we 1) got out to ride; 2) looked at new Vespas; and 3) found a great road.
Scoot Richmond1 is one of our favorite dealers. We discovered it not long after Linda bought her 2010 300cc GTS Super. They’ve done some maintenance on her Vespa and we buy some riding gear there every now and again.
It’s a great scooter, but it’s not red. Say, what color is that, anyway? Concrete chic?
The Scoot Richmond jaunt was also a bit of a test run for a possible ride to St. Petersburg in October, assuming half the nation hasn’t succumbed to the coronavirus2. We looked at a Vespa GTS Super 300 HPE3, which is fairly close to what Linda has now, except this new model has ABS and traction control, which are good things to have. We’re considering options now.
Quick conference at at a stoplight.
While it’s good to have a destination, the ride is still the thing. We took I-95 south to Richmond, which was somewhat of a mistake because that interstate is frustrating enough to be an expressway to one of Dante’s Nine Circles of Hell4.
It was soul-crushingly hot, too, the heat just bouncing off the bare cement. The rolling roadblock of endless stop-and-go traffic, with no discernible reason, was another Dantesque bonus.
Scoot Richmond has a lot of bikes in the parking lot, including this one, an old 550cc Honda Four, that looks a lot like the Honda 500 Twin that my old friend Tom McCray took to San Diego. His wasn’t a cafe racer, though. I think this belongs to a Scoot Richmond mechanic.
But the ride home was great. Instead of the hellscape boulevard of I-95, we took I-64 west to U.S. 522 north and things got better immediately. 522 is one of those twisting two-lane roads of Robert Pirsig lore5 that takes you through tree-shrouded rolling countryside.
The church we should have stopped at.
It’s kinda what motorcycles are made for. Freeway pressure disappears and the road opens up and you’re enjoying yourself. You pass into shade thrown by a line of trees and the temperature drops, like going from a hot porch to the kitchen and opening an icebox door.
The helmet-mounted GoPro, firing photos at five-second intervals, captured this.
And there’s more to see, more life to observe: An old stone church with an ancient cemetery that we really should have stopped at to investigate; a family-owned gas station where customers park pickup trucks and are hailed by name by the women behind the counter; and farmhouses and barns and abandoned fruit stands and everything else that waits for you around every curve.
All told, about 267 miles, according to Terra Nova’s odometer. A good day on the road, with my favorite riding companion.
1 – It started as a scooter-specific dealership but has expanded to selling Triumph, Moto Guzzi and KTM. Accordingly, they’ve changed their name to Moto Richmond, but Scoot Richmond is still our moniker of choice.
2 – I’m still part of a group that covers coronavirus and it’s so disheartening to see the blacklash against science.
3 – I downloaded a PDF of the Vespa brochure and found it to be 37 MB worth of rather garish color photos, with only one (above) tangentially connected to travel. I’m aware how sales pitches use lifestyle appeal, but why the yotz6 can’t Vespa acknowledge that their scooters, at least the 300cc models, can be both fun to ride and capable of long-distance travel?
4 – I’m betting it’s the fifth one, Anger, since drivers are apparently driven mad by the stop-and-go traffic and start cutting in front of innocent motorcycle pilots.
5 – In “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” Pirsig writes: “Secondary roads are preferred. Paved county roads are the best, state highways are next. Freeways are the worst…Twisting hilly roads are long in terms of seconds but are much more enjoyable on a cycle where you bank into turns and don’t get swung from side to side in any compartment.”
6 – That’s another Farscape reference. You’re welcome.
We saw this BMW R75/5 being towed by a pickup truck on I-81 on the way back from Starbase Nashville a couple of weeks ago; at first glance I thought it was an old Honda CB750 because of the color and chrome fenders, then we got closer and I saw it was a BMW.
We stopped at a hotel in Wytheville, Virginia, for the night and I was pleasantly surprised to see the BMW owner had picked the same hotel. I didn’t get a chance to speak with him, but I was able to eyeball the bike early the next day, while taking the dogs out for their morning constitution.
Probably 128,344 miles.
What a beautiful bike. Closer inspection made me think it was carefully restored or extremely well preserved and maintained, but it was near-perfect either way. There were 28,344 miles on the clock (maybe it was actually 128,344 since it was a five-digit odometer) and the state safety inspection sticker was current, as was the New York state plate.
I’ve always liked the classic BMWs. The Slash/5 models were produced from 1969-73, according to bmbike.co.uk. This one has about 50 hp and a top speed of 108 mph.
Drum brakes, front and rear.
With Skipper, our hyperactive Treeing Walker Coonhound1 tugging on her leash, I photographed the bike from all sides.
And here’s where it gets slightly weird. It wasn’t until later, looking over the photos, that I learned the significance of the sticker on the right side below the saddle: Philip Funnell, a legendary BMW rider, dealer and builder from Canada. He’s taken bikes around the world at least twice and was inducted into the Canadian Motorcycle Hall of Fame in 2010.
The manual petcock controls fuel to the engine.
One of his bikes, his handcrafted R75/6 Podcycle, is on display at Bob’s BMW in Jessup, Maryland, a dealer whose service department has taken care of Endurance in the past. Linda and I were there five days ago, looking at touring bikes. I must have walked right by the Podcycle.
I don’t want to say I feel cheated, but I would have loved to learn where that New York BMW had been and whether its owner knew Mr. Funnell. We’ll call it a near-brush with history and leave it at that.
1 – Skipper is the dog we found abandoned and starving on the side of I-95 southbound while driving to Myrtle Beach more than two years ago. She’s doing fine now and can pull that leash like a sled dog.
So we broke out the bikes on July 4th with no real destination in mind, only a desire to get away, and we ended up riding west to West Virginia.
The entire trip was low-key though it was hot and humid, not the dry, soul-scorching Arizona inferno of Yuma to Gila Bend, but still. You have to take the weather as it comes, so we Winston Churchilled it through. Once you’re moving, the air cools you and it’s really not so bad.
You can’t see it from here, but the Yamaha saddle was a pain in the ass.
It was a good ride, of course; I figure we did a leisurely 262 miles in 8 hours, most of it off-interstate on old U.S. highways and state routes through rolling countryside. We stopped to fuel up a couple of times and drink cold Diet Dr Pepper (Linda) and Gatorade (me).
My interior monologue followed a script of crikey, I really haven’t done this in a while, have I? as unfamiliar aches and pains in the shoulders and arms began reporting in.
Opportunities for unwanted intimacy with the gas tank arose when I kept sliding forward on the saddle, no matter how I planted myself. It was something I hadn’t remembered from before and it got really annoying after a while.
But the pay phone still works.
There was also the rediscovery of other, more pleasant things I’d forgotten, like the ability to smell the places you’re cruising through. On this day, there were some inescapable whiffs of hot tarmac but also the scent of pine trees, which reminded me of motorcycle trips we’d taken in the Sierra Nevada, years ago.
I reckon the apex of the ride was in Baker, West Virginia, at a pleasant, old-style, country-store type of BP gas station1 on State Route 259. Two other riders pull in as we’re filling up and the guy on the Suzuki asks about Terra Nova:
“How do you like that?”
Linda, the mission navigator, in her “hey, don’t hit me” jacket.
And we start talking about the year and model and how he likes his Super Tenere2, and we rabbit on about Yamahas and BMW shaft-drive problems and Adventure Rider.com and as he’s pulling away I realize we’ve been talking for 3 or 4 minutes without either of us wearing a coronavirus mask and I feel like a right frelling3 idiot. And we were doing the mask thing and social distancing during the ride, too.
Masks deployed, we find ancient patched wood floors inside the store and two tables’ worth of Donald Trump campaign memorabilia. The nice lady at the cash register asks Linda about the Vespa and says, “That’s a real cute-looking ride.”
Later: Things got complicated.
We get home without incident and I start fiddling with Terra Nova’s saddle the next day, making no progress as I futz with different leveling positions and search for smaller rubber contact pads and tools. I end up tearing apart half the workshop to find a T50 tamper-proof Torx wrench, which was absolutely ridiculous.
A “tamper-proof” Torx wrench4 has a hole in the business end.
But it was really good, even with the aches and pains and out-of-kilter saddle and ludicrous tool hunt, to get out and ride again.
1 – With adjacent post office.
2 – Which is what Terra Nova is, a Yamaha Super Tenere, 2012 model, Generation 1. On the infinitesimal chance the Suzuki pilot is reading this, I haven’t done the ECU reflash but I did upgrade the clutch basket and the cam chain tensioner with Gen 2 replacements.
4 – Look, this is part of some needless design overkill on the part of Yamaha for its OEM sidecases. One could argue that they hinder the sidecases from being unbolted from the bike and stolen, but it’s nearly impossible to fit a Torx or standard hex key into the sidecase rail bolts when the sidecases are still on the bike. Besides, any self-respecting thief is going to carry “tamper-proof” wrenches anyway without trusting to chance.
Also: Belated apologies to Gabriel García Márquez for the category.
Linda’s 2007 Yamaha Vino scooter. Remy will be here to investigate; Cody is around somewhere.
The coronavirus has virtually shut down the world, but we won’t be talking here today about the number of infected persons and the awful fatalities and the monumental screw-ups that have ushered this pandemic into our streets. I work for a news organization covering this and at times you just have to get away from it, for the sake of your own sanity.
Linda and I have been assiduously working from, and staying at, home since March 13 and only recently have I turned back to our motorcycles, parked silently in stasis out back.
The new tools, plus the mail-ordered bolts for Terra Nova’s luggage plate.
I started with her 2007 Yamaha Vino scooter, a 125cc bike that was her first two-wheeled motorized vehicle. It’s possible – when all this is over – that she’ll ride the Vino or her Vespa to work in the District so I started futzing with things to make it road-ready. Even though that road is at least a month or two or three away.
It didn’t have much in the way of an onboard toolkit so I ordered a basic set of Cruz Tools and augmented them with a couple of extras, a 17mm wrench and 8” crescent. That got wrapped in plastic and put into the storage bucket below the saddle.
Then I started wondering about fuses; I hadn’t put any spares aboard, and God knows you always need to carry extra fuses.
Damn. A glass cartridge.
Checking the manual, I was astonished to see the Vino runs on glass-cartridge fuses1, 10 amp, only two, one working, the other a spare. Glass-cartridge fuses; I haven’t had a motorcycle with those since my very first bike, a 1974 Honda CB7502.
Also to my surprise, the Vino started with only a little fussing, maybe a dozen attempts on the kickstarter to save the battery. But she fired up more quickly than I thought, and stood there purring away, waiting to go somewhere.
So the Vino is online. I’ll try and give her a bath this weekend, along with Linda’s Vespa and Endurance and Terra Nova. Working on the bikes is good. Now I’m starting to think about places to go.
1 – I carry spare fuses on my bikes, but they’re all blade affairs; I ordered a pack of glass cartridges online just for peace of mind.
2 – Thinking of my old Honda made me think of my friend Stephan Wargo (Steve’s nephew) and his 1978 CB750, which is just about showroom perfect. (How did he get the rust off those chrome fenders?)
The Shimano [shifter] also has thumbscrews for easy adjustment. Like the SunTour, it has plastic sleeves over its lever arms to make your grip on them more secure. Some think this is inelegant, but it works.
– “Two Wheel Travel, Bicycle Camping and Touring,” Peter Tobey, editor (Dell 1972)
Spotted an ancient Fuji bicycle this morning on the way to a haircut – I told them to cut only the gray ones and so emerged nearly bald – and paused to look it over. What a nice bike.
Motorcycles and bicycles have small styling cues that etch themselves in memory, place them in time and sometimes transport you.
Example: My first motorcycle, a really-used 1974 Honda CB750, had green-faced speedometer and tach dials. I can’t see one of those dials, on another bike or in an eBay photo, without thinking of that Honda.
But this Fuji is obviously someone’s commuter, nicely kept, and like the Raleigh I found in Coventry two years ago, it’s a genuine ghost from the past. I have a yellow Fuji S-10S, purchased during the Ford administration, and this orange Gran Tourer SE outside the barber shop is about as old1 with lots of identical components.
Circling around, probably making passersby wondering what the hell I’m doing, I see lots of memories:
the two multi-colored stickers around the seat tube2
wheel reflectors mounted 180 degrees opposite the Schrader valve stems (to balance out the wheel spin)3
the brake’s safety levers, which were never considered very safe (since they couldn’t impart enough gripping force, they used to say)4
the aluminum disc spoke guard behind the freewheel5
the rat-trap pedals with toe clips and straps
the Nitto Olympiad handlebars
And there are others, the chrome front forks and quick-release lever and gumwall tires and Fuji-badged SunTour components. The “Fuji Vx” rear derailleur is really a SunTour device and I’ve mourned the loss of SunTour since forever.
The derailleur shift levers are mounted on the handlebar stem6 and they have the classic plastic sleeves that make me think of the line Some think this is inelegantbut it works in “Two Wheel Travel: Bicycle Camping and Touring,” a 1972 book that was my bible for a time.
But it’s the Dia-Compe centerpull brakes that almost have me laughing out loud because they make me remember a long-ago visit to Broadway Cycle, a long-gone bike shop in Cleveland.
It was a genuine bike shop, rather dark and not very wide but deep, with a variety of bikes at different price levels. It was run by two guys who knew their stuff and liked their work. I bought my first 10-speed there, a silver AMF Roadmaster that served me well.
Anyway, some friends (Tom McCray and Eric Blemaster among them) and I had bicycled out there to get parts or tools or some such and we were jonesing over new bikes we couldn’t afford. For some reason, I asked one of the shop guys about brakes.
“Are those brakes Dia-Compe?” I asked, pronouncing it dee-a-com-pay which I thought made me sound like a cognoscenti.
“You mean die-comp?” the guy said, not missing a beat, and my friends burst into laughter and dee-a-com-pay became part of our lexicon, our language, our legend, something we would joke about decades later.
I was half-tempted to find the Fuji’s owner and congratulate him or her for keeping it on the road. But one doesn’t do such things, of course. And I probably wouldn’t have resisted the temptation to ask about the dee-a-com-pay brakes.
1 – Circa 1980 or 1981, near as I can tell.
2 – My Fuji lost the bottom one years ago. The other remains by the grace of Scotch tape.
3 – I removed my wheel reflectors because they just weren’t considered cool.
4 – Ditto for the safety levers.
5 – And for the spoke guard. “It’s just extra weight,” the bicycle magazines used to say, and its absence forces you to pay attention to the rear derailleur’s adjustment, or risk sending your chain into your spokes on an ill-advised shift.
6 – Mine came mounted on the downtube, which I really like. It makes you get more involved with the bike while shifting, or something.
Each stage, system, subsystem and component is analyzed to determine its contribution to loss of mission, vehicle, crew, or other critical objective.
– NASA Tech Brief 68-10252, July 1968
The meticulous three-week itinerary was etched in Excel, a named mission, a route and a list of friends to visit along the way, some of them cherished colleagues I hadn’t seen in years.
Terra Nova was packed and parked in the driveway, perfect; I was suited up and had helmet in hand, GoPro cameras mounted and ready. All I had to do was climb aboard, fire it up, and ride away.
And when I got to the door, I stood there, looking at the motorcycle, thinking about the long miles and days ahead and having only one thought: What’s the point?
And I went back in the house, put down the helmet and unsuited. And I didn’t go1.
That’s…unprecedented. We’ve done one decent long-distance motorcycle ride nearly every year for almost a quarter-century. But I didn’t go2.
That was nearly four months ago and here would be the place to insert something funny about a team of system analysts reviewing reasons why. The truth is, I just lost enthusiasm3.
The main reason was family related; my mother died in April 2018 and my father has been struggling alone since then. A sort of creeping dementia has taken hold of him with a climactic scene between us back in May.
I’d gone up to spend a couple of weeks with him since my sisters and brothers were doing the yeoman’s share of looking after him. I live six hours away from him and they all live within minutes, but that’s no excuse. Staying at the house with him would ease some of their burden for at least a while, I reasoned.
Alas, no. Growing up, he and I were not close and two rough weeks in April stretched into a worse third one in May and then it all turned tragic, with him telling me I wasn’t his biological son. Which is patently not true.
Whether the dementia gave him the voice to say what he’d secretly wished over the years or simply made him truly confused, it threw a shadow over my long, bitter drive home alone in the Jeep4. And the rest of the year, as it turned out.
But things slowly got better. Linda and I went to St. Pete in October, as we’ve been doing, which helped. And now it’s 2020, another year we used to read about in science-fiction stories when we were kids. I’m determined this year won’t slip away.
St. Pete Beach, October 2019
1 – Not to mention how I tried, during those three weeks, to readjust the ride by cutting a day here, another there, and others. I ended up calling and sending emails to friends apologizing for not seeing them as planned. They must have thought me quite mad, as the British would say.
2 – Because she started a new job and didn’t have enough vacation time, Linda couldn’t have gone with me this time out. But let’s be clear on this point: the mission abort was not her fault, absolutely not. It was all me.
3 – I was particularly unenthusiastic about riding the endless flat dismal desolate stretch of I-70 through Kansas and eastern Colorado. Traveling alone on a motorcycle means lots of time to think in the solitude of your helmet (hence the mission designation). I couldn’t bear the prospect of those dark thoughts bouncing around the confines of the Arai over that piece of highway.
4 – I can testify to being really pissed. “Spitting nails” would be a useful description.
When you hear hoofbeats in the street, look for horses, not zebras.
— Unknown
Endurance, my 2000 BMW R1150GS, has been sitting reproachfully under cover on the back patio for months now, waiting for me to get her back online. I’ve been taking more guilt trips than road trips, it seems.
I’ve been out on Terra Nova but the rest of our bike fleet has been down. We took Linda’s 300cc Vespa in for a tune-up and new tires and her Yamaha Vino 125cc scooter in for new tires and valve stems.
I saved the BMW for last. I bought yet another battery, washed off the dust and most of the cobwebs, and got to work.
Then I turned the key and pressed the start button. The engine fired up but idled rough. I shut it down and tried to think. It had been quite a while since I had it going but I’d put Sta-bil in the fuel tank before winter and I couldn’t recall any problems the last time I’d had it running.
My only answer was that the fuel had gone bad so I started making preparations to pull the tank and empty it. It’s a multi-step process; you have to unbolt the tank, disconnect various fuel lines, and the wires to the fuel pump (which is inside the tank).
This was going to take a while. I hadn’t fully removed the tank since installing the crash bars way back in 2000 at Starbase Reno.
Throttle cable, seated and unseated.
I was preparing to disconnect the fuel lines when I had a thought: the starboard throttle cable. It’s a quirk of the BMW fuel system — the cable can slip out of the knurled housing and desynchronize the engine.
So I looked and there it was, the cable was unseated. I moved it back into place, checked everything else, and tried the engine again.
She started up and purred like a kitten. A little thing like that. Another lesson learned.
Sept. 9 | Day 3: We arrive after dark, the GPS giving me muddled directions, or maybe I was just tired and confused. Linda and I roll into the driveway around nine o’clock, I think.
And yet the woman I have come so far to see and her husband are still holding dinner, hugging us as soon as we get off the motorcycles.
“Forty years ago, did you ever think we’d be meeting like this?” she asks me, and I have to say, honestly, no, no, I did not.
Let us call her The Poet. She was a girl I’d known in high school, a true poet, a perceptive and heartfelt writer, a genius, and one of the kindest, gentlest and most Zen-centered people I’ve ever known.
She was best friends with The Artist, another girl I knew, a gifted artist and soulful poet and writer who dazzles me with her intellect, insight, empathy and clarity of thought.
We hung out together (as we used to say) but they were a binary star I orbited at a distance since I could not match their brilliance.
I admired both. I learned from them and remembered them — though it was less a case of remembering and more of never forgetting. After graduation we built our separate lives, fanning out across the country, across decades.
Forty years — what a mammoth block of time. It’s been that long since I’ve seen her and now she’s standing before me, and I’m with my wife and our motorcycles, the vehicles of my own time that brought us here, all on a dark driveway in Tennessee.
“Well, come in, come in,” they say. “Are you hungry? We’ve got dinner.”
Since we’re staying the night, I pull the bags off Terra Nova and Linda’s Vespa and we go in to eat. Over savory bowls of Thai-inspired chicken-and-rice soup, we fill in gaps four decades old:
For me, a couple of wives and a series of newspaper jobs around the country. For her, a journey of self-discovery out West, meeting a wonderful man and having children. A deep-rooted faith in their Mormon religion and church.
The night runs late and the dishes grow cold on the table. I want to hear more. She speaks of how they ran their own family dairy farm, honest caregivers of the land, their lives entwined with those of neighbors, community, and church.
I want to hear everything and she tells us this:
Their first child is a loving and happy and intelligent son, and learns to talk and walk early, following them around the house. At age five, he begins fetching mail from the box across the rural road.
An avid talker, he tells his parents about an angel, saying to his mother, “Mom, I saw an Angel and I know what they look like.”
And one day…
“He was running across the road to get the mail and a motorcycle came over the hill,” she says. “He was hit and killed.”
Time stumbles as the shock ripples through us. I had not known, even after all these years. I struggle to focus and a somber voice in the back of my mind whispers I never thought we’d be meeting like this.
I can’t remember what Linda and I say beyond oh, my God and I am so sorry and such; it was inadequate anyway. Still and silent, we listen.
She tells us how she, her husband, their families and everyone they knew were devastated beyond comprehension. She says to her husband, sometime later, “I don’t see how we can survive this.”
And he, from a place of inner strength I did not know could exist, offers the most courageous and unforgettable thing I have ever heard.
He tells her: “We can be bitter, or we can be better.”
Slowly they take up their lives again. The church and community rally around them. They forgive the rider on the motorcycle, giving him back his life. They have more children. They rebuild around the awful loss.
It is very late. We all say good-night and are ushered into a guest bedroom. But it is hours before I sleep.
It’s impossible for me to reconcile the sweet girl I adored in high school and the pain of that day; they cannot exist in the same space. I’m in awe of the strength and courage of her husband, who gave them a way forward. I grieve for the wonderful child I will never know.
And how, dear God, we’ve come to their doorstep on motorcycles.
Time has lurched on, but I am forever haunted. We were only 52 hours into the mission, with 16 days, two thousand miles, and now the rest of our lives to go.
The next day I call The Artist long-distance after we shut down the bikes in Birmingham, Alabama. We talk and I weep a little and she, with her wisdom, pulls me back from the edge.
But Linda and I are subtly changed, tempered somehow, forced to take a different perspective. The belief we can be better takes up residence in my head1.
We’ll find the New Orleans motorcycle ride will be more intense, more deeply felt, than anything we’ve done before. All that’s ahead of us — the fall in Underwood, the stranger in Selma, the lonely sadness of Bryant’s Grocery and everything else — began that night in Tennessee.
Note: It took more than a year for me to write this story. I’ve shown it to my two friends; they have kindly given permission to post. I could not have done so otherwise.
Addendum: In later correspondence, she tells me, “Following his death I imagined his sweet spirit running across the road into the arms of an Angel while his earthly body was waylaid and left behind.”
1 — Where it stays to this day. And I will testify his words helped me deal with Steve Wargo’s death, 164 days later.
“We either make ourselves miserable or make ourselves strong. The amount of work is the same.”
— Carlos Castaneda
Sept. 4 | Day 5: So we weren’t traveling by motorcycle, but naturally I couldn’t stop thinking about leaving Terra Nova behind and wondering (in random moments) how to prevent it from happening again.
Besides the obvious remedies of sensible packing and taking time to properly load the bike, I started fixating on other motorcycles, ones more suitable for long-distance, two-up travel. Perhaps that was part of the answer.
I started with Harley-Davidson, of course, since we were seeing so many of them on the highway. Harley touring bikes are big, heavy, and comfortable.
They’re also stable on the road. I remember riding through terrifyingly heavy wind on our way back from Mount Rushmore in 20101 — “It was like someone was trying to kick the bike out from beneath me,” commiserated a fellow rider at a fuel stop2 — and seeing Harley tourers ride through that wind unaffected. It was their weight, low center of gravity, and long wheelbase that helped.
Big, heavy, and comfortable. And expensive, as we found during impromptu visits to Harley dealers3 starting in Hays, Kansas, and continuing during our sweep back and forth across the country.
As noted during our 2015 visit to Premont H-D in Quebec, I like Harley shops — the bikes, the tools, the garage signs on the walls. So we started looking at Harley touring bikes.
Expensive. I liked the Road Glide with the fixed fairing4 but couldn’t countenance the double headlights5. The Street Glide was next, and I liked it, though the fairing is on the forks. The Road King wasn’t bad, either.
But they are expensive, starting at $19,000 and soaring northward. So buying new is no-go, though there were some interesting used bikes, priced to inflict mild dysrhythmia instead of full-on cardiac arrest.
So we paused at Harley places in Golden, Colorado Springs, Durango, and a few more, where I casually inspected bikes and nonsensically started collecting H-D poker chips, a Harley thing6.
Since returning home, I’ve looked at other bikes, sport-tourers like the BMW R1200RT, a really nice touring bike with final drive reliability issues, just like my Endurance. Alas, I found Triumph no longer makes the Trophy motorcycle.
Yamaha’s FJR 1300 and Kawasaki Concours are other, less pricey, possibilities.
I’m not sure if I’ll actually get another motorcycle. But I am thinking about it. And looking at bikes while Terra Nova languished at home took some of the sting out of driving a car while we should have been on a motorcycle.
1 — It really was frightening, more so than the Sierra wind blasting across U.S. 395 as I rode Endurance home to Reno from San Diego. I had to pull over and wait out that one.
2 — We met two riders from Pittsburgh at a South Dakota gas station and naturally we talked about the wind. It was somehow comforting to know they were as unsettled as I was.
3 — No matter how you regard Harley, it has an unmatched widespread dealer network. Most of them are located just off interstates, which (while perhaps putting them in a locale class with McDonald’s) makes them easy to find while you’re on the road. In comparison, there’s like one BMW motorcycle dealer in all of Montana, last I looked.
4 — In which the wind-cutting fairing is attached to the frame instead of the front forks. It lessens the effect of wind on steering, since a fork-mounted fairing wants to take the front wheel with it.
5 — It gives the bike a deal-killing space-shippy appearance, at least for me.
6 — Look, I don’t know why. At one to two bucks apiece, they were probably the least-expensive souvenirs of the mission. And there’s a nice tactile pleasure in clicking them together in your hand. Lots of Harley riders collect them, apparently.
“I have kicked myself mentally a hundred times for that stupidity and don’t think I’ll ever really, finally get over it.”
— Robert Pirsig, “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”
Aug. 31 | Day 1: It isn’t easy to admit1, or even remember, but here it is: We ended up not doing a motorcycle ride this year — the motorcycle ride, the thing I long for the most, every year.
Ah, it was my fault. All that work — getting the bike in perfect shape, installing a new saddle, bolting on highway pegs for me, fitting a passenger backrest & longer footpegs for Linda, extending the luggage plate — all for naught.
The cause was simple: I did not allow enough time to pack the bike.
In a series of events too tiresome to list here, we weren’t able to leave until literally 1:30 a.m.
And then, when I finally get everything aboard, and Linda climbs on, Terra Nova is way too heavy. We take a couple of turns around the block and she handles like the Exxon Valdez.
In the dark, I shut down the Yamaha, stare at it, and force myself to rationally consider the options:
1) Full abort, no ride at all;
2) Delay another day and try and make it work;
3) Take the bike solo, and leave Linda home;
4) Take the bike myself, with Linda following in her car;
5) Leave the bike and take her car to Colorado.
The first is right out, as the Monty Pythoners say. This trip is essential, I’m carrying the memory of an old friend who has died, and Colorado was special to him.
The second is tempting but carries no guarantee. We’re already running late and we have a mission itinerary in which the first few days depend on us being somewhere. Each miss puts us farther behind.
The third is a complete no-go because I love my wife and we do these things together. It wouldn’t be fun without her.
The fourth is ridiculously, sinfully, wasteful.
The fifth reluctantly wins the day. We have to unsuit — I even had the Camelbak on, filled with two liters of icewater — dock Terra Nova in back of the house, throw the bags (sans motorcycle-related gear) in the back of Linda’s Honda Fit, and drive off.
I seethe for the first few days, until we cross Kansas and get into Colorado and the mountains rise up in front of us. We have places to visit and people to see.
Still, for the entire trip, I can’t help but notice lots and lots of motorcycles on the road. And not one of them is mine.
1 — Which explains why it took me so long to write this.
Motorcycle Days 
