August 17, 2009

by Jim Zeiser
(Deposit, NY, US)

I had just changed the oil, the weather was hot and steamy so....what to do with the scooter? Road Trip! I had an errand to run that required picking up tickets from my office thirty-five miles away.

Now it would have been much more comfortable in my air conditioned car and certainly faster on my Kawasaki. I opted for the adventure of doing a seventy mile trip on my Chinese scooter. It requires riding along the Cannonsville Reservoir which, while very scenic, is very remote. No cell phone service, no houses and the only help would be a passerby willing to stop. Gotta love it.

The scooter ran like a champ as we negotiated the twists and turns around the reservoir and moved over for passing autos. I reached my office in under an hour even with the traffic I hit in the one village I had to pass through.

Coming back I stopped for gas so I had a margin of safety with mileage. The last time I did the trip I came home on fumes since the scooter only holds one gallon. At that I did the trip in almost exactly two hours. At about seventy miles per gallon I saved some money and only used an extra twenty minutes to half an hour of time. Not to mention saving wear and tear on my car. Oh, the scooter turned to 2,000 miles on the trip.

Now I've gone two miles for every dollar I spent on it or is that fifty cents a mile? I'll have to get out the calculator.