Come On, FALL!

And by that I mean AUTUMN, not "fall off your scooter". :)

I went out for a ride last evening, into the magnificent, low-humidity, low 80's temperatures we somehow magically had last night. It was glorious in a way I can barely describe. In fact, I even considered a jacket before I left the house, and once I was out, I thought that I probably would have been comfortable in my denim jacket at least.

The wind was cool and nothing like the wet-washcloth slap-in-the-face of a few days ago. The sun was crisply throwing off it's last rays before sinking below the horizon, and I was on a good-deed mission to paper the local area with flyers advertising our church's preschool.

Conveniently, I could fit a stack of my flyers inside my topcase without having to roll or fold or bunch them up. I LOVE my topcase. Love it.

I rode all over town, taking flyers to places I knew had community bulletin boards, and chatting with people who wanted to know about my scooter. A mom said her little boys thought it was the coolest thing ever and dubbed me "the COOLEST MOM on the block!". Fun!

As the sun was sinking, I rode home, realizing that I felt much more relaxed and happy than when I left my house. It's amazing that riding around on my Pumpkin Queen, wind on my skin, miles slipping by me, could make me feel so good.

Yay for scooters!

Market Rides in the Summer

To market, to market....to get a weekly bunch of vegetables.....

One of the fun things about this area is the huge number of farm markets that have sprung up all over the place! Come summer, everybody's heading out to a market on Saturday -- or on Tuesday evening, or Thursday!

I love to ride my scooter over to the market in the morning. With my topcase on, I'm set for carrying home an assortment of yummy veggies from our local CSA farm, Victory Farms.

The market I attend most often is the South of the James Market in Forest Hill Park.
This is a great city park in a really eclectic neighborhood in Richmond. lots of trees, a good playground, paved trails for walking...and VERY busy farmer's market on Saturdays.
This morning when I arrived (and found a place to park!), look what I saw across the lot!
Someone else has good taste!
The best thing about my scooter, aside from the fun of actually riding it, is the sheer boatload of stuff I can carry around. All my weekly vegetables fit into the topcase perfectly, no squashing the squash or mangling the lettuce!

I don't get to ride to the market every week (sometimes I have to bring my kids and my husband) but when I do get to go by myself, I love to take my Buddy!

JOY = SCOOTERS

Joy truly is riding across the Huguenot Bridge on a gloriously sunny day and feeling like I'm riding my own personal rollercoaster....

....and being able to smell the roses and the honeysuckle and the freshly-cut grass as I roll on by...

...and feeling the wind through my riding jacket vents......

....and finding a parking space under a tree RIGHT in front of the shop you want to go into....

....and realizing your armored riding jacket folds up well enough to fit in your topcase...

...and realizing you are not as afraid as you anticipated you would be...

....and knowing that this kind of FUN -- the scootering FUN -- is so much more than you thought it would be.

On Target

Yeah, okay, so it's been a while since last I posted. I haven't been riding NEARLY as much as I should have been, unfortunately. Part of that was due to unfortunate allergy side-effects (vertigo! It's not just for pilots anymore!), some of it is due to my desire for wearing a skirt or shorts far outweighing the desire to suit up to scoot, and some of it is due to the inevitable need to schlep the kids around. Hard to strap a carseat on the scooter.

But, the Pumpkin Queen is still going strong!

She even has a friend, now that my husband is riding a new GZ250 in addition to working on his old '82 Honda Hawk.
(Incidentally, I took those two pictures one right after another in the evening....amazing what a difference ambient light and no flash makes!)

Today, though, I got to ride for a good chunk of the afternoon. I had to run some errands, and wanted to scoot by (literally) the hospital to visit a friend who's just had her first baby, and there was a local art show I wanted to check out. Two of those things are not kid-friendly, so after lunch, off I went.

It was sooo nice out today -- low 70's with plenty of sunshine -- but SOOOOO windy! Yikes. Still, I had a great time taking all the back roads to my destinations, to purposely avoid the four-lane divided highway major artery road.

It was my Target run, after the hospital visit and art show, that proved the most interesting. I had a number of items to obtain on my list, and I figured I'd grab a new plastic milk crate while I was in the store to bungee to my front rack to hold the purchases. Apparently, milk crates are passe now, since I could not find a single one! Bummer. No matter, I had bungees in my pet carrier.

Shopping completed, I took four bags out to the scoot to load up and drive home. I knew it, but I didn't fully grasp, just HOW MUCH STUFF you really can put on a scooter! Here's the lowdown:

In the pet carrier.....
-my really small purse
-a bottle of bubble bath
-two kid toothbrushes
-four ceramic bowls in their packaging

In the topcase...
-a magazine
-a small pack of diapers
-four salad plates in their cardboard packaging

In a bag hanging from the front hook...
-four small metal pails
-two kid sippy cups
-a tube of diaper cream
-assorted other stuff

And strapped to the front rack.....an eight-pound bag of cat food! (hey, the cat's gotta eat!)

Getting it home was a piece of cake. no problems with the load, and only a few funny looks from people coming toward me (it was the cat food, I know it).

Oh, and I had to scare the living hell out of some dumbass lady driving a Jeep Cherokee. She was turning across my roadspace in the parking lot, looking in all directions except the one she was driving in, and nearly ran right over me.

139dB of Stebel air horn took care of her. And I kept right on riding. :)

Have I mentioned I love my Buddy? Huh? Have I?