Why yes, I am a dork!

So last week, for some reason, Heather and I got to discussing motor scooters. We'd talked about getting a motorcycle or two a few years back, before we had kids. Anyway, with me living so close to work now, and Heather needing the Scion to haul the kids around, it doesn't make much sense for me to be driving a V6 Ford Ranger back and forth to work when I could be taking something like a motorcycle that would use way less gas, not to mention the wear and tear on the truck. So that got us to thinking about a motorcycle again, or even a motor scooter. We figured a 50cc scooter should be fine for the back roads I can drive between work and home, and in Florida you don't need a motorcycle endorsement on your license to drive one of those.

So we looked around online, and I found some very cheap scooters that looked nice, but I did a lot of research and found out that they're all cranked out on the cheap in mainland China and resold by shady characters over here, so you take your chance on getting a decent one to begin with, and then you're pretty much screwed if anything ever really goes wrong with the thing. So that was out and we decided we should look for something name-brand, with parts and service readily available. Kept an eye out for used ones for a few days, but the only one we saw that looked especially promising was undoubtedly snapped up within minutes of being posted on craigslist, because when I called a few hours later my call went to a full voicemail box. We figured buying a new name-brand would be all right since the monthly payment would be pretty low, so Saturday we headed to a dealer in Longwood whose website indicated they carried Honda and Yamaha scooters. We got there to find that they had no scooters at all in stock but were expecting some Schwinn-branded ones, which I'd seen and knew were questionable Chinese knock-offs anyway. So then, of course, they tried to talk us out of scooters altogether (saying some things I knew were fibs to do so, damn greasy salesmen) and into some of the cycles they had on hand, which were admittedly very nice, but quite a bit more than we were looking to spend right now, even without considering the motorcycle safety course and licensing and insurance and all that. So we pretty much gave up, but then I happened to notice that there was a Vespa dealer in Winter Park, and the folks who make Vespas have another line of less-expensive scooters that looked pretty sweet. So we went in there on a lazy Sunday afternoon, had the place and the owner all to ourselves, and ended up getting this:



It's a Piaggio Fly 50, 4-stroke 50cc (well, 49.9cc to stay under the 50cc limit in most states) engine, and really pretty sweet! And it should get somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 miles per gallon, which is the real point of the thing. Munchkin absolutely loved it, I couldn't hardly get her off of the thing! It's quite comfy, and I got the hang of driving it pretty quickly. Heather even took a quick spin on it, since she'd like to be able to take it out now and then too. So far I've just taken it around our neighborhood a few times, and once out on the busier street that runs alongside our subdivision. It's fairly zippy, though so far I haven't gotten it above 35mph. I'm really hoping that it will creep up to 40mph or so as it breaks in--I can get to work on 35mph streets, but I'd feel better knowing it could get just a bit faster when necessary! I'll miss having music on my drive, though, so I need to get a little pair of helmet speakers to use with my mp3 player. Oh, and some sweet aviator goggles. ;)

Other than that, the weekend was fine, though Hallie's been having some trouble sleeping at night. Maybe she's getting her teething underway, since she's been a veritable drool factory for weeks now. :)

Hope everyone out there in LJ-land had a good weekend as well!