Bryce National Park

Timothy Leary’s drug trip lay before my feet. A quirky wormhole of scooter transport had delivered us, in disbelieving bodily form, into a psychic trip of wonderment; like the first vision of a cornea transplant patient. From a Dune movie set we had traveled from Green River, Utah two days ago, through beautiful John Ford western scenes, had our baptism in Escalante and sweated our little scooters through the freaky Mars-like landscapes of Kodachrome State Park; but now there was this...

If ever an atheist wanted to believe in a god, Bryce might be the place to start. For all the Grandness of THE GRAND CANYON, the pounding thunder of Niagara Falls, for every grand place on this Earth...Bryce has got to be both the weirdest looking and beyond AWESOME place to have a zip code. As you enter, past the usual

concessionaire crap of gas stations, horsey ride stables, ATV rental places and beyond the antelope grazing at the National Park entrance, nothing on God’s green earth is going to prepare you for the fact of holiness beyond the asphalt parking lots. Your freaking cranium is about to have every neuron lit on fire like the space shuttle lifting off into the stratosphere. Woo-hoo space cowboy!!!

Some things are best left to pictures than worlds, and so help me, even Emerson and Theroux would have crapped their pants at this sights of this park and their pens fallen silent. This is not some placid Walden Pond, with ducks and birds chirping in harmony with the earth. There ain’t no water here for miles partner. Mid-summer, this is a dried out corpse, left with only the flesh-less marrow-less ribs of

blood-red spires poking into the cosmos blue.Something was here, that is a FACT. Mountains of sandstone wasted down into ridges, now fed upon by time immeasurable, left with glory in decay. Like the magnificent maple, turning blood-red until final rot of brown.

I can only say that we spent two days there, time had left me and I wished all methods of time keeping had been destroyed. Oh to sit naked under a juniper tree in the red sand, like an indian brave and watch the eagle soar the rim’s currents, until the moon slid into it’s place and paced it’s course beneath the watching stars, to the chant of the Ancient Ones. As a youth I remember sitting on the roof of our New Mexico house, peering a the stars, the desert night warm with cooling breezes. What child would not dream under the stars of the Milky Way? Vacations sometimes stir adults the same way; wondering ‘what if’s’ and ‘with whom’ and ‘maybe if there and then’? I try not to live in regrets, but live in the NOW and not the then. But desert vistas and starry nights make their stirrings without permission, and emotions make us wish for a personal cosmos, not one of numbers and probabilities, but a love and purpose to our being. We each have that inner poet and songwriter in the desert-scape, words played on the heartstrings.

One such poet we met in Bryce played in a punk band. But he was in a more of a blues mood when we greeted him across the campfire. He had just been dumped by his fiancee, jilted a month before his wedding, the Hawaiian honeymoon called off. He rode a scooter too. Our Vespas brought a little balm to his wounded psyche, and we talked gently, as if to a scared child, pacing and moving to avoid the fire’s smoke and his smoldering hurt. No advice was given, except on the best views on the road ahead. He was in a long haul mood though, touring the west at breakneck pace, and not really there for the sights. I think he wanted to hide from friends back home, hide from the hurt in his face, in his food, in his clothes, and in his being. He was so numb even Bryce slide off his back and back into the desert dust with little mention. I’m not sure anyone recovers from hurt like that. I wish you PEACE brother.

We scootered away from Bryce one cool morning, still wild-eyed, in general hippie bliss. This is Nature’s Mecca or maybe it’s freak show; come to worship or to be amazed, but whatever you do, trek there before you die, or you have not lived pilgrim.

Escalante National Park to Kodachrome State Park, Utah

Fully refreshed by Calf Creek Falls, we motored a short distance to the Escalante River Gorge. We hiked, along with half of Utah it seemed, a very short distance along the Escalante River to the entrance of the Slot Canyon. High waters from the spring melt had closed this 15 mile (one way hike) that made Escalante famous. The twisting serpentine canyon, where one hikes often in knee deep water, pressing chest to back against smooth sandstone walls, had long been a desire of mine to do. Whereas Calf Creek Falls is the cathedral of soaring spirits, the Slots Canyon is the prayer closet of inner beauty. You become part of creation, pressing flesh to stone, led by the hope of the light filtering down through the cleaved walls. Places like this are the West’s Walden Pond. Unfortunately our pond, sic river, was closed. So we scootered onwards.

In fact, most of these parks and monuments we were passing through are more thoroughly explored by four wheel drive and foot, as we were finding. The paved roads gave one just a taste of this alien place. In fact there was even a colony of Mars aspirants dwelling in a special ‘space station-like’ facility to simulate a space colony experience out some dusty road her. Personally I’m more of an ascetic than a scientist, so I’d rather sit under a starry Milky Way than wish to be in it. To each, his or her own, the desert provides a place and atmosphere for that type of dreaming.

Our Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument experience blew by way too quickly; as we managed to miss the Peek-A-Boo and Spooky Canyons turn-off. We had been warned by another tourist couple that this turn-off was not marked well, nor even said the names of these canyons. (Thanks National Parks Service!). These were our Plan B slot canyon hikes (dry and no river to contend with). A bit short-changed on our sight-seeing, and not desiring to backtrack in the mid-day heat, we arrived in the town of Escalante. With nothing to draw our interest, we gassed up and pressed on.

Dropping off the flanks of the 9,000’ Aquarius Plateau was a scenic morsel. Even car, or better yet scooter-based, touring is great along Highway 12. The roads snake along ridges, with both wondrous peak and canyons views alike. I was liking this.

Even the valley floors with small communities of Henrieville, Cannonville and Tropic provided interest. Just as animals adjust their survival strategies to the desert environment, so did the early settlers. In several towns we noticed houses built into the ground, to take advantage of the earth’s cool year-round temperatures. With just the pitched roofs showing, they looked like a tornado’s aftermath; cool but weird. Efficient pioneers.

We called it a day in Cannonville, tenting at the KOA. The campground was packed with foreign tourists making the western circuit of Las Vegas-Grand Canyon-Mesa Verde-Canyonlands-Capitol Reef-Escalante-Bryce-Zion in their CruiseAmerica and similar rental RV’s. The ratio of Americans to foreign nationals was hovering around 25%. As we were setting up camp, a Canadian fellow came up, introduced himself, and wanted to chat about Vespas. He regularly took his small RV down to the American west and was thinking about adding a scooter to his rig. He told me about a friend who, on a lark, jumped on his Vespa one day, and rode across Canada, from Edmonton to Nova Scotia. All in one week! This is am amazing feat of scooter-dom, some 2972 miles in all. Again we found were following in the bold, and perhaps fool-hardy tracks, of some seriously deranged individuals. Even we got some pretty astonished stares from those air conditioned RV’s! We finished settling up the tent and rode two-up on my Vespa four miles into Tropic for dinner. Tropic has several motels and diners unlike Cannonville. It was jammed with foreign tourists, in spite being only a mile in length. Tour buses overnight here before trips to Bryce and Escalante. We had a great dinner and beer (surprisingly, this is Utah after all) and motored back in the cool dusk along alfalfa fields, the overhead irrigation systems moistening the crops and air.

We were up early, always a good idea in the desert, and scootered back to Tropic for a 7am breakfast. Minutes after we were seated, group after group of tourists arrived. Many were part of various motorcycle groups. I heard some Norwegian in the background and introduced myself. A group of eight Norwegian guys were touring for two weeks on Harleys rented out of Las Vegas. They were celebrating their graduation from graduate school. They seemed quite amazed by our scooter adventure on Vespas, one quarter the engine displacement as theirs. We chatted amicably for quite a while. Turns out one of them was from Hamar, where we had visited before. Dear Norwegian friends of ours live near there and the world seemed quite cozy as we discovered shared places in different times. Our new Hamar friend had even lived in Denver for three years, attending University of Colorado. And we had hosted our Norwegian friend’s college-aged daughter back in Boulder for seven weeks the summer before. Norway seemed very close in our hearts as we finished up breakfast, waved goodbye, and scooted back to strike down the tent.

There’s a worthy detour along Highway 12, Kodachrome Basin State Park. which lies nine miles south of Cannonville. In the cool of the morning we rode a nice paved

road to the park. A wonderful campground, full with yet to awaken campers, was idyllically situated among red sandstone fins, spires and walls. Had we known about his place, I think it would have been a nicer camp site for the night. Although our two meal detours into Tropic had been worth-while from the closer-in Cannonville. The State Park has a 2.9 mile Panoramic Trail that exhibits the most unusual white upright cylindrical towers called sand pipes, that are usually partially surround by remnants of the different colored red sandstone. There are more than sixty of these sand pipes, the tallest being 170 feet tall. Except for these spectacular sand pipe formations, the rest of the park felt a bit like Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs, Colorado. We had a nice quick hike, which loosened up our legs for the next scooter jaunt to the magical Bryce Canyon National Park.

A ride into GLORY

We bade goodbye to our little meadow and brook at 8am. Last night had been a needed recharge and now we were quickly climbing through the ponderosa pine forest on the flanks of the Aquarius Plateau. The road was twisting back on itself, the Vespas having no problem of it. One misconception is that scooters can’t climb, the other that they are slow, which I had already dis-proven at 80 mph. In fact my scooter will leave most cars well behind when a traffic light turns green. The reason is gearing, they are geared for city traffic speeds. Instead of carrying big macho speed gears (impractical even for cars with the majority of driving in the city), scooters will excel in the 30-45 mph range, a perfect mountain road speed.

Our little mountain goats took us all the way from 5300’ to 9400’. In four thousand feet we had climbed from the Northern Desert Zone, predominated by sagebrush varieties and grasses into the Foothills Vegetation Zone which was landscaped by pinyon pines, juniper bushes, cottonwood trees and box elder trees along the creek beds, through the Lower Montane Zone with large aspen tree groves, numerous willows and deciduous bushes, abundant flower beds of red Indian Paintbrush, fireweed, geraniums and violets of various colors, rusty Gamble oaks bushes then transitioning

through the Upper Montane Zone, forested with conifer trees, like the limber pine and Engleman spruce, finally topping out at the Alpine Zone, with bare knolls of thin grass and dwarf flower yet to bloom in the short summer season. Here in early June, snowbanks lined the road and the aspens had yet to leaf out. Locals would tell us how heavy the snows had

been this year, but to climb from sandstone desert to snow in an hour was hard to fathom. Intellectually I knew that 2-3 degrees Fahrenheit was lost for each 1000’ in elevation climbed. But to experience it so dramatically was alien to me. This was like stepping into airliner in New York and coming out in Paris. Smoke and mirrors. In fact, four times during our trip we would made this Jekyll and Hyde roller coaster trip of changing ecology zones, up and down, changing from shorts to parkas in minutes.

At the Homestead overlook we enjoyed a panorama of the five Henry Mountains to the east and below the Waterpocket Fold bisecting the canyoned plains in red. The scale was mind bending. New Mexico and Arizona were just at the horizon’s limit; terrain bringing unimaginable hardships for the early Mormon travelers.

We were looking for gas and Boulder, Utah didn’t have any. This town really didn’t justify being called a town; no gas, no food, no shops. What it did have was a nice Anasazi Indian Museum adjoining some excavated pueblo ruins. I’ve seen a lot of southwestern museums with Anasazi displays in my life. This was a good one and the modest ruins a nice walk back in time. It was clear that white man didn’t discover anything. Explorers from the Old World found well-established settlements coast to coast, north to south. Sacagawea led Lewis and Clark on their great journey of discovery, interpreting for them as them moved through various native territories. The Anasazi, or the ‘ancient ones’, lived in northern New Mexico and Arizona, southern Colorado and Utah in 200AD to 1300AD. For some reason they disappeared from their Utah and southern Colorado dwellings and moved south into the pueblos of New Mexico. Even the great Mesa Verde settlement was abandoned. Some speculate this retreat was cased by over-use of limited resources of wood and game. The tree rings suggest a time of drought. Some speculate even religion moved them. It was clear though that the region stood empty for 500 years, until in the mid-1800’s when white trappers arrived and shortly thereafter the Mormon migration wandered into Utah’s lonely canyons and found a home.

Boulder, Utah is the jumping off point for the Burr Trail Scenic Highway. One drops from rolling forests down to the Grand Staircase, into Escalante National Park, further on to the southern part of Capitol Reef National Park and finally making a dusty destination in the northern part of Glen Canyon National Recreation Area. It is then possible to trek north back up to the highway 24, near the east entrance of Capitol Reef. In essence making a loop of 200 miles, with half of it dirt. Princess Vespa vetoed my suggestion with her eyes, putting this detour in the ‘future trips with the 4x4 truck’ category. I’d miss Deer Creek Campground but it was too early in the day to stop any way.

Any misgivings about not taking the DETOUR were overcome by the pure joy of the rollicking ride down the SPINE of this wild, steep ridge we were rapidly plunging down. Cliffs to our left and to our right plunged a thousand feet. No guard rails protected us from a BASE jump. I was dying for my helmet cam, lost somewhere back in a Colorado closet. I do not overstate the wonder of this section of the highway. It is MANDATORY that every aspiring scooterist ride this road, and only from north to south. This is the true sacrament, pardon me Jesus, of scooter faith. You will not be denied heaven in this life, for glory is this tarmac. And baptism is in Calf Creek Falls.

One of the “10 Best Reasons to Scooter” is you can park ANYWHERE. This is especially important when you just finished riding down one of the “10 Best Roads on the Planet” and you are swinging into one of the “10 SMALLEST PARKING LOTS in America” and hoping to hike one of the “10 Best Hikes in the USA.”

We’d heard Calf Creek Falls was a nice hike to do in Escalante National Park. Sort of a side note to the Slot Canyons which every aspiring Ansel Adams, Zone System worshiping, photographer lusts to record. Calf Creek Falls is nice,

in the way the Sistine Chapel is a nice place to read a book, even THE BOOK, if you don’t bother to LOOK UP!. The hike in (since you were a lucky parking scooter-ista) is a narrow track making it’s way up a red canyon that gets just more and more

amazing with each turn. Add a meandering brook, where I counted nine trout keeping pace with the lazy cool current, meadow bottoms with shade trees, all lined by gigantic Windgate red cliffs and you get something nice, damn nice.

We passed many other pilgrims on our way to the falls. Families with truculent kids, tolling in desert heat, trying, dear God, to ‘make memories’, while Johnny throws his water bottle to the dust, scuffing along in his $300 Nikes in the ocher grime. (I picked up Darwin’s mistake’s water bottle and gave it back to him as I passed by, with a word on how, “dumb shits die young.” What ever)

It took us an hour to make the falls and as we cleared the trees lining Canaan’s pool...glory be... I was a BELIEVER. A believer in water, regenerative water;

flowing from sources unseen above, plunging down 126 feet through air; foam, spray, slick sand rock, turquoise oasis. From biped to fish again I became, and swam I did. I lured Princess Vespa into the pool and soon another free spirit frolicked and swam with us, leaving her hot timid husband behind. For a brief time I had my harem, a harem of mermaids.

Capitol Reef National Park

Shortly after leaving Hanksville the wind began to moderate. It had been a hell of a start for Princess Vespa and, as usual, my best-laid plans got warped by life’s realities. The plan had been to leave Green River, Utah in the cool of the morning and this wind, well, it was just freaky. Our late start was necessitated by a needed visit and then a subsequent overnighting with a friend, who had been just released from the hospital. Life had thrown us behind the eight ball and into the gutter. Finally with a few miles under our belts, we began to enjoy some desert scenery that wasn’t monochrome grey. After all we were on one of America’s scenic byways, highway 24 in Utah.

The road began a gentle climb beside an idyllic meandering river, flowing strong and wide. Gentle grey bluffs framed a few pastures here and there. As we climbed slowly upwards, the growing canyons walls protected us more and more from the wind. Suddenly life was fun again and the purring scooters a perfect friend. Speeds of 45-50mph were the norm and traffic had died off since we were now traveling away from Lake Powell. The Princess felt like a Queen!

The next twenty miles flew past and suddenly the steeping road had towering multi-hued red sandstone cliffs with red, grey and white bands; we were now near Capitol Reef National Park, ascending the oddly named Waterpocket Fold. This
monstrous geologic feature is a giant buckle in the earth’s crust stretching for more than 100 miles across south-central Utah. This is how it was formed; imagine a flat plain, really an ancient sea bottom stretching across America. Layer and up on layer of different colored silts settled to the bottom over eons. These silty layers then compress each preceding layer into a multi-layered and stripped cake. Well this cake is more like jello to the earth’s forces and from the middle outwards, minor ridges turning to higher and higher ridges, ever marching outwards beyond the preceding ridges, until mountains rim this lengthy valley. All the ridges are different colors and hues based on the age of the sediments that formed them. It truly is a sight when seen from the air. However that was not our current view. We were more like ants crawling up the colorful ridges, lost in the micro picture twists and turns, yet to understand the macro tectonic wonder of it all.

The first entrance to the park from the east is a bit of a let down, just an outhouse, bulletin board and small parking lot, the main visitors center nine miles beyond. The road though begins to get majestic with Capitol Dome and several other grand white walls circling the tarmac. The Visitors Center in located in the Fruita Historic District . This is a century’s old orchard in a narrow river flats area,
home of the Gifford Farmhouse and a schoolhouse and blacksmith shop.

These restored historic buildings evoke one’s imagination to ‘Little House on the Prairie’ days; showing what a real one room school house must have looked and felt like in the late 1800’s. This was America’s outback. It was the ’back of beyond’ up these windy hot canyons, tracked by a few lonely rivers. This was heaven work for these stout Mormon pioneers, following the call of the Church. Go out and bring the earth into submission and fruitfulness was the call, both agriculturally and bodily, literally. You needed a big family to run these outpost farms. The more kids you had the quicker the labor force grew and the sagebrush uprooted, the kids turned adults then married and bred, more families meant more settlements grew into towns. Fruita was no town, but it showed the industry that a few families had achieved more than a century ago. The shady cottonwood trees lining the campground were so inviting along the Fruita River. It was now 5PM. A few families were cooking an early dinner by a smoky campfire; several kids running from tent to tent, some folk were cooling toes in the swirling creek and splashing each other. However our day had just started mileage-wise and finally we were in officially scenic country. With some regrets, we turned our scooters away from the Park Campground and headed south on Capitol Reef’s Scenic Drive, an out and back paved jaunt of 20 miles. We knew that the few remaining campgrounds spots would be taken before our return, but with the late start today and the sun around until 9:30 PM we’d still get lots of viewing in.

The Scenic Drive followed a broad canyon, red walls and ridges off to the left, with low hills to the right. Stoney grey soil held sparse vegetation, only brushy juniper trees provided some green relief. As we lost elevation, I thought how this was

stereotypical “Roadrunner” cartoon territory. I half expected the coyote to appear around some corner with a stick of dynamite in his hare-brained way to get the roadrunner and instead blow himself up. Walt Disney must have roamed parts of the west like this. An easterner would be astounded by the views here, but to a resident of the west I knew that this was just the warm-up act for the beauty to come. However it was mighty pleasant motoring I must say; the wind was calm and the temperatures reasonable in the low 80’s now and dropping. We followed the pavement to the end and called it good. A short segment of dirt had tempted me onwards, but the call to dinner and a distance campsite still to find saw us whipping back to the main highway. We had only just touched what Capitol Reef had to offer, but most of the Park’s wonders require dirt road capabilities and a desire to navigate dust, gravel and washboard. Besides, it’s nice to leave a reason to come back, it’s it?

Just outside the Park we stopped at a scenic turnout and contemplated the distant hills and canyons from which we had come. My puny Blackberry camera lens couldn’t bring it all in so I chilled with Princess Vespa and let some vacation therapy soak into my bones.

It was 7PM, we were hungry for dinner and ready to find the SPOT for the night. After 10 miles we stopped for fuel and gas at Torrey, Utah. I filled the water jugs in the men’s bathroom so we’d have water for the night. On my way out a teenage clerk helpfully said, “Oh if I’d known you wanted water I’d filled them up for you out back”. Got to love that small town attitude. I thought he was going to say that I couldn't fill up the jugs and to buy the bottled water instead. Oh cynical city boy!

We could see a high plateau just out of town to the south, up high the aspen trees leaves were fluttering in the setting sun. That familiar Colorado high country feeling was there and we headed south on a mission. As we sped past lush hay meadows and a few farm houses, the odd trophy home cropped up here and there. Now I knew we were getting into the good stuff. Ahead I saw a couple riding their ATV on the road, probably returning from a field. I slowed as I caught them, waiting until I was just off the husband’s shoulder. Playfully I asked him if he “wanted to drag!” They laughed and hit their throttle hard and crouched down like they were racing us. It was a good end to a beautiful evening and we were in good spirits. Minutes later, just inside the Dixie National Forest boundary we found our special camp spot. It was a small grassy meadow, next to a rushing stream below a white sandstone dome. Day 1 of the scooter expedition was done. We had battled through a late start, 59 mph winds, 90’s heat, many a steep road grade, felt the uncertainty of a new mode of travel and had new territory to figure out. We were pretty exhausted as we fell asleep by that brook. But I knew that the VISION had been true and our little Vespas would see us though the rest of the way.

DUNE Riders

We arrived in a smoking hot Green River mid-day, a town lassoed along I-70, comprising of half-shuttered storefronts eking out a dying breathe of commerce with only gas stations, a few motels and campgrounds to serve as a watering hole to tourists and travelers. Denver was 350 miles to the east, Salt Lake City 284 miles to the north and Las Vegas 385 miles to the southwest. Tired truckers, Harley riders by the dozens, Lake Powell boaters and desert loving tourists fueled up body and engine there, but definitely not their soul in this place, moving on without a thought of ever staying there. But we needed to store our truck and trailer here. I had called the local KOA campground previously and made arrangements to leave our rig there. “Why of course that’s okay, we do it all the time” a cheerful male voice had answered me. And now in the flesh I met the bearer of that voice, Ken. Turns out Ken was a transplant of a few years from back east. He was too busy to get out exploring much these days, busily running the KOA with his wife, “but occasionally I get to go out ATV riding” he replied with a hint of sadness in his voice. However the sight of our Vespas brought his cheer and out a floodgate of memories of HIS Vespa Expedition came!

Turns out we were following in the path of another scooter pioneer. “Back in the 1960’s my buddy and I rode 1500 miles from Massachusetts to Newfoundland and back. I was on a bored-out 150cc Vespa, that’s was160cc, and my buddy on a 150cc. Best ride of my life and the worst. Oh the twisty New England roads were great until it snowed. Yeap, it snowed and snowed one night. We were on our way back, on a tight schedule and still had to go on. I still remember riding carefully in a single narrow car track up and down those snowy steep hills, slippin’ and a slidin’, wasn’t sure I’d every make back.Just about froze to death too!”

Princess Vespa and I were in major awe as he told us his story and meekly answered his numerous questions about OUR trip, which had yet to start nor achieve anything in duration like his. Mind you this conversation was in the cool air conditioned office of his. Our expedition would certainly see no snow and we dreaded stepping out into that 1PM desert heat. Those molten seats would fry our asses!

After we loaded the camping gear, into surprisingly compact but effective saddlebags, we gassed up (all 2.2 gallons each-a range of 130 miles) and motored westward onto the interstate for a brief hop of 10 miles to our exit onto southbound highway 24. Now Princess Vespa is normally confident riding up to 50mph on quiet backroads, but suddenly her life depended on keeping pace with truckers at 75mph! Of course there was a 59 mph GUSTING side wind with blowing sand in the 92F heat. Oh yeah baby, this is your vacation!

A white-knuckled spouse sternly gave me ‘the eye’ as she wheeled to a stop at the first exit into HELL. Sand was blowing everywhere and she informed me that “there better not be any more of that!” I assured her that somehow the sand would stop making dunes and the sky not generally fall down. What I hadn’t mentioned was this was the main arterial road south to Lake Powell where crazed ski boat owners from Salt Lake would be flying past in their quest for fresh water ripping. And highway 24 is a twisty shoulder-less road, that rolls across the bleached desert like the bones of a broken-down roller coaster. This intel was on ‘a need to know’ basis and she didn’t need to know I reasoned. With reassurances given I twisted the throttle like a bat out hell and got well out of earshot.

Turning due south we were continuously buffeted by headwinds now. We were losing more altitude now, rolling down the San Rafael Swell, one of America’s great geologic sights.  But we were too gripped to sight-see, nervously keeping our diminutive craft upright, pushed jerkily left then right and back in unpredictable combinations and counter-steer franticness. We by-passed the Goblin Valley State Park choosing to shorten our late start and windy day.

Fifty-four miles seems short on the map, but our start in that heat with blowing sand and heavy winds was a bit of a trial. We were glad to coast into a Hanksville service station, more for an ice cream bar than gas. In the shade of the sheet metal awning, radiating more heat than shade, we groggily ate our ice cream. Inside, three old coots rocked their chairs to the throb of an ancient swamp cooler. A real Mormon Mayberry. For 15 minutes nairly a car passed when suddenly a mob of Honda Goldwing and Beemer riding retirees pulled in. I lost count at twenty as they hogged the pumps like puppies to a teat, more than three to each. We jawed with two, finding out that they were from other states, Texas and California, en route that day to New Mexico across Lake Powell by ferry. As they cooled in the shade we rolled out westwards, determined to find some elevation and cooler temperatures.

Planning the Trip

By early June this ITCH was really bugging me and now it was time to see if the VISION was really the true fruit of motor sport religion or false doctrine. Could I really pull off a major Vespa based touring trip or would I really look stupid to some grizzled tow truck driver as he loaded up my broken dream on the flatbed of his tow truck in the middle of nowhere? As such,expeditions are not to be taken lightly. There’s a hell of a lot of planning involved; micro camping gear to choose, special lightweight and highly nutritious foods to buy and package, all mechanical systems to be tested, rebuilt to factory specs and retested again...and I of course did none of this. Just grab the sleeping bags out of the closet (one proved not warm enough), deciding to buy food on the road (i.e. living off nutrition-void gas station junk food and missing meals), grabbing my trusty camera bag (missing both my Nikon SLR camera and my GOPRO helmet video cam), and departing without a road map (and the replacement one would later blow off my scooter into the Utah desert). Basically I was no more prepared for the enemy than a fuel convoy in Iraq. Gas and go was my motto. And so I went.

Now every nomad needs his harem. I was lucky to have just one willing woman in my life at all and she was tenuous at times. I mean, do you want to put your life on the line with a nut case like me?! The PLAN called for all expedition members to HURL themselves against the FURY of Utah desert storms into the MAW of summer heat, all the while sharing roads with sleep-deprived truckers and road hogging rental RV’s driven by autobahn-conditioned German tourists! Fortunately Princess Vespa was so fried from too many years without a real vacation to care about her life and limb and just the thought of any escape was too seductive to resist. I  convinced her that scootering around wondrous desert National Parks and camping out every night was akin to an Riviera vacation...after all she was on an Italian scooter wasn’t she? So the PLAN was set, a week or more in duration, comprising of a 700 mile loop visiting national parks and national monuments along three of America’s Scenic Byways, highways 12, 143 and 89 in Utah. This is a trifecta of cinematic wonderment and since I didn’t bother to pre-check my camera bags for photo and video equipment, I’d be recording our trip on my camera phone now, like every other sun burnt shorts-clad tourist, egad. (Persevere with me, oh faithful blog reader!)

As D-Day came upon us, Princess Vespa and I doled off the cat and dog to a supportive friend and loaded up the Vespas onto the truck and a trailer for a modest 352 mile shuttle across Colorado's continental divide and onwards to the Colorado/Utah border, finally parking in mid-day heat of 92F at the last stop gas town of Green River, Utah. This was finally it, no turning back for food or water. Adventure or Bust, maybe both, so begins the chronicles of the first Scooter Expedition...

The MIGHTY Scooter

As a 60's kid I remember clutching chest high handlebars and being securely squeezed between my father's knees on a furtive Vespa ride. Back then Vespas were the rage in Hollywood, appearing in movies and straddled by gorgeous starlets. Scooters were mod in Britain and even the punks turned them into their rebellious Easy Riders. The engines were 150cc in size, needed two stroke oil added to the gas, kick started and clutch shifted. The brakes were worthless, but what youth wanted to slow down? This was FREEDOM BABY! Pretty girls in short minis riding side saddle, Italian style. The scooter craze was short-lived though, it's demise caused by a flood of cheap unreliable Vespa knock-offs and the rise of the American muscle car. It was now all about raw horsepower and scooters were soon left in the burning rubber.

During the 1970's the Arab oil embargo put a scare into America and the reintroduction of the cheap smoky 49cc scooter made it's snail-paced way back into our roadways and garages. Yes it was very fuel efficient but it was more nerdy than cool to ride. And that was before nerd meant anything like computer genius, it meant dork and NO ONE wants to be a dork! Bye Bye scooter.

Fast forward to the next millennium. Computers that could power a fleet of Apollo landing craft are cheaper than a big screen TV, big block V8's are losing ground to the Prius, 20's and 30's hipsters are nerds in a cool way, fixie bikes with no brakes are de rigour on the college scene and yes, the scooter is back! Scooters are now  'Green' and not meaning  'cheap-skate' any more. Old guys get waves from cute girls and even the Harley Davidson chopper guys on the TV program Orange County Choppers ride then in almost even episode. Mikey is now way cool!

Like most of America I too had my transportation revelation and now I was down-sizing from my own two wheel forms of the big bore engine and soon a shiny silver new 2007 Vespa GT200 arrived in the household. Gas prices were pegging $4.50 a gallon and this was to be my wife's new commuter car replacement. She was an experience dirt motorcycle rider and this would be a piece of cake for her to ride. No clutch to mar nice office shoes, a full wrap-around cowling for modest skirt wearing and an extra tall windshield behind which she would bravely push commuting limits of winter temperatures of 21F! She and her trusty Vespa would rack up more than 10,000 miles in the first three years of ownership. Now that she had so bravely forged the path of Vespa limits I bought a nice lightly used 2007 250ie Vespa (fuel injected, not an aspirated carburetor like hers).  With dual ownership came forth the ITCH, and soon the DREAM, well actually it was the VISION in deed was hatched...a VESPA EXPEDITION. Short mileage and great camping. Do it enough days in a row and well now you have a real trip!