Seaside, California: Day 1

Odometer: 0–131 miles

Now playing: “If You See Me Getting Smaller” — Waylon Jennings

I am shivering as I am writing this newsletter. Shivering because I thought it was warm enough to not need my jacket for the ten minute drive from my AirBnB (in Seaside) to dinner (in Monterey). I was wrong; you always need a jacket at night on a scooter. ALWAYS.

Maybe it doesn’t need to be said, but leaving the Bay has been Very Weird. I never understood how much I had settled into the place until the few weeks before I left. After college in Columbia, Missouri, I moved to Tulsa for the summer, then Pittsburgh, then Mountain View. Four places in the span of a year. Since then I always knew I could handle moving, but the last place that felt as comfortable as Oakland was Columbia. It’s been odd to give that up.

Anyway. Packing up a place that you’ve lived in for two years (six months of it with another person) has been a special kind of hell, so I’m glad to be done with that. From now on, I’m resolving to do packing drills: every six months, act like I’m moving and have to decide what to keep and what to throw away. Keep things slimmed down.

The scooter itself has handled brilliantly so far. Minor issues with wobble due to weight imbalances are likely to be corrected once I fill up the reserve fuel cans mounted on the front rack. By the end of the day, I had learned how to apply the brakes to pretty much entirely cancel out the shake, so even traveling without extra fuel won’t be an issue.

The last major Vespa trip I took was to Mono Lake, around two years ago, so I’m re-learning my distance riding skills. Specifically, the skill where I hook up my in-helmet bluetooth speakers because riding a scooter with nothing but wind noise for four hours is kinda boring. Admittedly, it’s the kind of boring where you’re in love with life and everything is beautiful and nearly perfect, but you’d also really like to be able to think of something besides the fact that the chorus to a Katy Perry song is stuck in your head and it keeps playing *over and over*. I can’t handle a month of that. Tomorrow, the speakers are going in.

Also, friends, if you’re on my route (roughly corresponding to Highway 1 + Route 66 + Pittsburgh + NYC), or you know people on that route, please let me know! I really want to meet as many people as possible on this trip, people I’ve known for years, people I’ve never met before, people I’ll wish I had never met before, anyone. In my experience, the best part of travel is people and the weird, often ridiculous conversations you have with them when you know your time is limited.

For a future newsletter, I’d like to answer some questions folks have been asking me about this trip, so if you’re curious about any part of it (my gear, mechanical specs of the Vespa, why I’m doing this completely ridiculous thing at all), reply to this email with those questions (I think replies are automatically sent to my email? This is my first time trying this, will see if it works). It seems like most people are curious about the highway capabilities of my GTS 250, but I’m sure there are other things y’all would like to know too.

Tomorrow, I’m off to Santa Barbara via Big Sur, which is my absolute favorite drive in the continental United States. I’ll tweet photos. Lord, I will tweet so many photos.

Till then,

-Esten
 
 PS: The “Vesparado” name comes from the internal twitter scooter mailing list, which I believe was started by Patrick Ewing, so apologies to Patrick for stealing the name.