We are a two scooter family. I ride a 1988 50cc Honda Elite; my wife a 1988 50cc Yamaha Jog. This pleasure can be traced to our wedding trip in 1996. We were staying in a little inn somewhere on the southwestern coast of Costa Rica, sharing our meals at the outdoor bar/restaurant with the monkeys that lived in the trees above the bar. We'd take a sort of taxi down to the beach and sit in the Marlin Bar, which, for some reason, we called 'Marilyn's'.
On one such taxi ride, I noticed a place that rented motor scooters. We stopped and rented one for a day, with me driving and Susan riding behind. Well, that arrangement lasted for a couple of hours before Susan wondered aloud why she didn't have her own scooter, even though she had never driven one. So, we parked at Marilyn's and I sat drinking coffee and watching Susan slowly pilot the scooter along the beach road, disappearing first around the bend heading back to the inn and then, on the way back, disappearing behind some trees that bordered a campground.
She made this trip, back and forth, with me watching with love and admiration, a number of times until her speed, agility and confidence grew. At the end of the day, instead of returning the scooter, we kept it and rented a second one. For the remainder of our trip, we scootered all over the place, to a distant town for lunch or coffee, along the roads just for fun, to Marilyn's and the beach every day, and to the restaurant at the inn to scare the monkeys.
That should have been the end of our scooter adventure, but when we returned home, Susan reckoned that we really didn't need two cars. What we really needed was one car and two scooters. We searched the used motorcycle ads and found a guy who had two scooters for sale. We bought both for a total of $600.
Since then, we've used the scooters for short trips around town (Evanston, Illinois at first and now Monterey, California). We've trailored them to auto racing tracks and scootered around the grounds to watch the racing from various vantage points. We've taken longer day trips to distant towns for lunch or to explore.
Once, when returning home to Evanston on Sunday afternoon from Highland Park, riding down a wide but uncrowded Sheridan Road, we were approached from the rear by a motorcycle gang.(Actually, it was a group of men and women wearing black leathers, riding Harleys and, most likely, on their way to a picnic or something.) The gang fell in line behind us as we sped along at our maximum speed of 35 mph. We must have made quite a sight. After a mile or so, they peeled around us and took off, disappearing in the distance.
A few years later, while our scooters were parked in downtown Monterey, someone affixed a West Coast Choppers crucifix decal to the front of Susan's scooter, an insignia that she still displays proudly. We don't think of ourselves as this cute older couple on tiny two-wheeled vehicles. We are bad-ass motorcycle gang members. Sort of.