Modern Vespa

Fellow riders. I have a wonderful experience to share and is about picking my son from school the entire season almost everyday on 4 differentet scooters. It all started last year on August. My son started going to a different school and initially I signed him up to take the school bus.

Only for 3 or 4 initial days I allowed him to take the school bus and I would wait for him on one of my scooters to take him home. Problem is that the school bus was always late on an average of no less than 25 minutes and sometimes up to 40 minutes. I got fed up very quickly and I decided to start picking him up from school on my scooters.

When riding the scooter in the best of the scenarios I made the trip back in 6 minutes even (2 miles) when I got the two traffic lights on green. There are other neighboorhood kids that I have seen arriving 35-40 minutes later. Not only the other kids spent a lot of time on the actual route of the bus but also walking from the school bus drop to their homes.

Thankfully I was always available to pick up my son. Overall I saved my son about 30-35 minutes of his time and it gave me a excuse to always get the scooters up and running.

If you are curious to see if I ever broke down? yes I did..lol.. . One time I rolled the dices and I knew I was low on gas and played the gamble and lost(ran out of gas). Another time the scooter would die so many times at idle. It got to the point where it wouldn't start back up so it left me stranded. Little I knew/suspected that just a 1/4 to 1/2 inc air mixture adjustment would made such a big difference. I was fouling the spark plug badly

Another day I left the garage and as soon as I made my first 90 degree turn I was like : "whoaahhhhh". I had a big'ol nail on the rear tire. It cost me significant money to get the tire repair because I am running the tubeless set-up.

I learned a lot from this experience. One thing that I appreciate the most was the short gearing on my PX150 and my LML powered Sprint Veloce. I favor the short gearing over the long gearing on the P200E. We can argue all day long that the P200E (Malossi 210) has more torque and power but the PX150(166cc) and the Sprint Veloce (Malossi 177cc) got up in traffic easier, that short gearing pulled the 400lbs weight of the two passengers way easily in the 1-4 gears.

Would I do this all over again? hell yeah!!! count on it

Great time together. I worked from home and also took our boys to school and picked them up everyday. Good memories.

^^ Weather was permitting. The winter was very mild so around 345pm it would be around 70 degrees (very pleasant). It did rained about 3 times when I was picking my son but it was very light and we didn't mind it.

I added BBQ racks and back rest to two of the scooters for added comfort. Braking sucks with two passengers unless you have the front disc brakes so on that note i had to plan accordingly on the older scooters to give me that extra spacing (literally speaking).

I can't emphasized enough what a difference the short gearing made. I recall vividly telling my son: "look at the rpms and look how we can pull in forth gear ". Basically entering the neighborhood I could easily pull in 4th below 2000 rpms with two riders (400lbs both combined), the P200E with the Malossi 210cc would fall on its face. Same thing going up hill on my garage ramp, you would have to rev the P200E (210cc) engine significantly to be able to pull up while the shorter geared PX150 (malossi 166cc) and the Sprint veloce (Malossi 177cc) would pull effortlessly.

My observations are the culmination of trial and error and from paying a lot of attention to how the engine/gearing responds. If I had to hop on the hwy I would prefer the P200E because of the gearing but in traffic riding with two the short gearing in my humble opinion made a significant difference.

What an excellent way to build family memories!

We pick up our kids from school on the scooters and motorcycles several times a year, temperatures permitting. They loved the bragging rights but we could only do it when one had a day out of school. Three kids on two scooters won't fly in the US.

You wouldn't have that problem if you lived in Italy

Thanks for sharing, I love your pictures a lot, your daughter seems very happy. The moto Guzzi is lovely. Glad to hear that I am not the only one. I stablished rapport with the school personnel, security, traffic person and bus drivers. We were like a "celebrity" haha. Kids coming to us asking for a ride, questions like:" how fast does it go" or comments like "I seen a scooter like that on this movie and such".

Within the last few months I focused on important aspects of the scooters such as more power, better newer tires, newer brakes and back rest(BBQ) for all the scooters and all combined made a difference. I thought that carrying a full adult weight as a passenger demanded upgraded power/brakes/tires..etc and off course, it gave me the excuse to buy goodies .

Please, keep sharing your experience, keep posting your pictures, I love reading this kind of stuff and makes me smile every time.

Right back at ya!