Riding with the Scooter Gang and a Pot of Bad Luck

Some days you wake up and things are off, they don't feel right. Saturday morning felt like one of those days. I should have listened to my guts and declined the offer to use Bella, my better half's Vespa GTS 250 for the RTE with the Vancouver Scooter Gang.

Bella's seat is higher than on Paolo, my GT 200, so I had to tiptoe to begin with. The bike is a bit heavier, also because it carried some extra weight for the weekend tour we had in mind, and made it top heavy, something that I would miscalculate at one point...

I couldn't concentrate or find my Zen, and while we were headed to our first meet-up to join with another scooterist I kept thinking, I should have taken Paolo.

 Meeting with Ed and Casper (his Kymco) in Pitt Meadows

We took the back roads via Dewdney Trunk road, and meandered towards Mission to reach the next checkpoint but there were no other scooters to be seen. It turned out that they were only a few minutes behind us. However, we continued to ride to the RTE location Michael's Firehouse Grill in Dewdney.

Looking at the eatery's very conventional "All American" menu I doubted that they could offer anything edible to moi, the avid vegetarian apprentice. The soup of the day had bacon in it, and Ceasar's salad got cheese. So the the waitress promised that the lady cook would come up with something special, and she did.

 The gang is gathering.

 Diggin' in!

A dairy free special veggie wrap for me. It was delicious.

 Roland's BLT sandwich with fries was surprisingly good, too.

Stupid is as stupid does! (Forest Gump)

The rider was passing the closing bars although the red light was flashing long before. He was going so fast that we can assume to see him nicely wrapped around a tree or maybe run over by a train one fine day. 

Meanwhile we saddled our horses and rode towards Hope. it was a smooth ride, and we were making good progress.

There's a glimpse of Anna (on right), the only other lady in the gang.

Ed, the Kymco rider had some bad luck that day. While the bike 'jumped' over some railroad tracks the top case mount must have come loose. Suddenly the thing came of, slid past me and into oncoming traffic. The box was ok, but the mount wasn't, hence he had to improvise for the rest of the trip. It made for a fine back rest though.

But that wasn't the end of it. While the gang pressed forward at highway speed (and you could easily do 90 or 100 kph on that road), Ed's bike continuously lost performance, and became overheated. 

We got separated from the group, as they moved on, and we didn't want him to get stranded alone. So Geoff, the sweeper, Roland and myself escorted Ed to the gas station in Hope, where he hoped to get the problem fixed by topping up on coolant. Ed decided that he wanted to try and ride back home, and Jeff accompanied him to make sure that he got there safely.

But Ed wasn't the only one with bad karma today:

Bella is sporting her first battle scars. While stupid me tried to lift her on her center stand, I lost balance, and dropped her ever so slowly, but the outcome was inevitable. ARGH!

However, with the damage done, and out of the way, my Zen kicked in. That was it! No more bad luck would happen on this trip, and as a matter of fact it didn't. And so we decided to continue our journey.