Liz’s Three Scooters: Loading, Transport, Delivery

Over a long course of time, all three of Liz’s scooters have… amazingly, broken down.

Her Vespa has been sitting dormant for a while (battery issues), and the hope was that Chad (her repair guy) could fix it. Turns out, he got too busy and wasn’t able to do the repairs. And so it’s been sitting idle for some months now.

Recently, while riding the Red Vino, Justin had a breakdown near Western and Irving Park.

Even more recently, while Liz was riding the Black Vino around… it, too, died on her. She ended up having to ditch it in Wicker Park, and tied it to a bike rack near Wood and Milwaukee.

This morning, we rented a cargo van and proceeded with the arduous (and tricky) task of loading not one, but all three scooters up a plank. We’ve moved scooters before, but never just with the two of us. I was a bit worried there, as the Vespa is a remarkably heavy machine.

Despite the weight (and the two of us butting heads, and getting frustrated with one another), we were able to load up all three. It was a pretty stressful morning, all in all. But we were able to load things up with minimal damage, and made our way over to Scooterworks for the dropoff.

On unloading the scooters, there was this great sense of relief. Partly it was to be done with the task (which had taken us much longer than we expected), and partly it was to finally have the scooters *at* a repair place.

The one regret I have is: I wish it wasn’t so cold out still. There’s not much time left to ride these guys, even if they do get repaired fairly quickly.

I guess, once these three are all up and running again… it’ll be an interesting logistic problem, as to how we get/drive them back. Might have to call around to friends, and get a third scooter rider to help us drive one home.