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!

Mileage

It's been five months to the day I brought home my beloved Buddy (Pumpkin Queen) scooter. Since then, I've gotten my M class endorsement on my license (OMG, I can ride a motorcycle! ME!), taken the excellent motorcycle class, and put on this many miles:

I've gotten over my fear of being blown backwards off the bike, obtained REAL riding gear so I am good and safe, and learned to navigate some of the Richmond traffic, especially in the suburbs.

I was reflecting the other day just how much less scary this riding thing is....it used to really terrify me to commute to my office, because of a couple of divided highways that ended up being faster than the posted speed limit. Over the past five months, though, I have learned to handle more speed, and now I feel pretty confident about my bike at 55 and 60mph. Of course, I don't ride that fast all the time, nor do I want to, at this point. But, I know I can handle it, and I feel good about keeping up with traffic.

I am not over-confident, however.

A couple of near-misses have definitely encouraged my healthy respect for traffic and other vehicles, and have definitely solidified my view that pretty much everyone else might be trying to kill me. It's amazing how distracted people can be when they are all hunkered down in their great big SUV's, chatting away on the phone.

So, yay for me. :)

And in further proof that this house is full of scooter fanatics, I give you this evidence:

Scooter/scooter


Little scooters

Have a terrific day! And if it's nice out, go for a scooter ride!

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?

Spring has finally sprung!

Hooray for good riding weather, in which I can remove ALL the liners from my awesome jacket and go with all the zippers open!

I haven't been riding all week, because I either had to ferry the kids places, or my desire to wear a skirt was greater than the desire to maneuver the scoot out of the garage (thru the people door!). Also, it's time for it's first service (300 miles, baby!), and I was already past the 300-mile mark and didn't want to get too much further along before having the oil changed.

Yesterday afternoon and evening were trying. Allergies, a headache, total exhaustion for some reason, and non-napping preschoolers were conspiring to make ScooterMom a grumpy girl. I won't go into all the fun that two spunky and extremely smart little ones can cook up, but suffice it to say one was asking me if the Easter Bunny had come yet (ALL DAY!), and the other was turning our deck into a beach. Then came the full-contact egg dyeing, which consisted of one of them eating a dye tablet, and then spilling a cup of dye on the table, and the other clamoring to take eggs in and out of the dye. Ack!

After the munchkins went to bed, my husband suggested I go for a ride. I am very glad that I did. I wasn't really aware of the head- and soul-clearing ability of a good evening bike ride until I went out last night. Whew!

First, I conquered one hesitancy: gassing up at a gas station. I'd been warned about being careful with the pressure in the hoses, watching out for spray when filling the teeny tank, and up to now, I'd been filling the scoot from a 5gal gas can we have in the garage. Not anymore! I successfully (and carefully) put a bit less than a gallon in the tank with no spillage or spray! I don't think I've ever spent this little at a gas pump, not even in 1998, when gas was $0.87/ gallon! (ah, the good old days!)


After that little victory, I rode off to my favorite local de-stressing place -- Barnes and Noble Books. A chai Frappucino, a bunch of jewelry-making magazines and a couple of Easter basket gifts, and I was better. A bonus was that I FINALLY figured out how to open the !@#$% topcase on my bike! I've only had it for about a month, and even though Chelsea showed me how to open and close and lock it, I could NOT do it. And hey, there's all KINDS of room in that thing! Woo!

Riding home in the dark, the wind blowing through my jacket and my helmet, I thought I could really ride MUCH longer. Probably in the dark is not the time to try out a new route, but I sure thought about it. Maybe after the oil change and service, and after I get the new super-bright awesome headlamp installed, I can venture further afield.

It sure is nice to get out and ride, though.

Misconceptions

There was an article in my local paper today about scooter thefts in the region. In the article, the reporter talks about how "[scooter] Drivers don't need a license, just a form of identification listing name address and date of birth." I read the paper every morning, but rarely feel the need to write to the reporter about an issue. This time i did, because of the misconceptions regarding scooters in Virginia. Granted the laws are sometimes unclear, but in this case, making a blanket statement that a scooter rider doesn't have to have a license is incorrect. In VA, if your engine is greater than 50cc and the bike goes faster than 35mph, you need a license and tags, registration, all that good stuff. It's a motorcycle at that point, and you must have more than just some identification on you if you ride. I know the reporter got his info from this link at the DMV site, likely, but still. The code can be unclear in general, but in this case, I think it's pretty straightforward.

Anyway, as a scooter rider and lover, it does bug me somewhat to see the common misconception that my bike is a moped perpetuated. It'll be interesting to see if the reporter responds.

In other news, my husband is on Day 1 of his MSF course today. Soon he'll be riding his bike all legally and safe!

Almost...

Had my first near miss today on the way to work. Ack.

I was going up the divided highway, riding in the right lane, doing the speed limit (45mph), and here comes some guy from the other side of the highway. He was crossing through the median, turning left across the road to go in the direction I was going, and instead of turning and staying in the left lane and then moving over to the right, he turned directly into the right lane. Guess where I was? Yep. Right lane. I was trying like hell to stay out of his blind spot, but apparently either I was already there, or he just plain didn’t see me. Either way, next thing I know I am in the sand and crud on the shoulder, trying to steer, stay upright and honk the horn at him. He was close enough to me that I could have reached out and kicked his rear quarter panel at one point, before he finally saw me and moved over. Then, of course, he took off.

I was strangely (for me) not even shaken up, or upset, except that I was PISSED. It was all I could do not to chase him down and ask him exactly what the hell he was doing. There’s a four-way stop a little farther up the road, and I was hoping I could catch up to him. I didn’t. He was pretty good at staying well ahead of me, which was fine. I certainly didn’t need to be getting into anything with any drivers, but I sure thought about it.

The good news is that now I know my bike does 60, and I can ride it when it does.