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...