Hello everybody peeps, and for those of you reading this over the August Bank Holiday weekend, ‘welcome to the Isle off Wight’. Whether you’re there or not (there are other events planned for the same weekend!), fingers crossed that the weather’s behaving itself and that despite scaremongering in the press, credit crunches and other such worries aren’t putting any of you off getting on your scooters and riding off into the sunset to escape such headlines, for a short while at least – affording ourselves a wry smile or two at all the cars we filter past on the congested roads!

Super Vespa 300

Yes ’tis true, we’ve managed to get our grubby mitts on a new Vespa for testing purposes and already we’ve taken it into four figures on the odometer. In fact, the first weekend it clocked up over 600km attending a wedding in Belgium (congratulations Fatty & Sandra!) and by the time you read this we should be almost done with our back to back test of the Vespa 300 versus the GTS250.

Petrol talk

Speaking of Belgium; while over there recently for a rally, we happened to pull in to a Texaco petrol station on the motorway. Acting as normal, we tried to fill up, only to be told that due to the increasing value of fuel, this particular oil giant was beginning to roll out ‘pre-pay’ only across its chain of Belgian petrol stations.

For five British Lambretta riders, it wasn’t quite so simple of course. Unlike car drivers maybe, scooterists are often keen to squeeze in as much petrol as possible to guarantee making the next petrol stop that’s at least 50 miles away! So in we went to queue up, pay cash, return to our scooters and fill up.

Doug went for option 1; overestimate the fuel you need, return inside, queue up again and get a refund. I went for option 2; underestimate, return inside, queue up again and buy another litre or two. Of course we could have left our credit cards with the petrol station staff until we’d filled out tanks, but apart from the fact I don’t actually have a credit card, if they’re not prepared to trust us with all of 10 euros of fuel, why should we risk them cloning our cards?

For the rest of our trip we settled on option 3; avoid Texaco petrol stations!

And on that note I leave you with a suggestion to take a look at this month’s centrespread, courtesy of the Lambretta Museum in Weston-super-Mare. How things change in only 50 years…

Andy

PLUS: Discount Ferries

Hello everybody and welcome to the July issue of Scootering. Without wishing to count my chickens, hopefully you’ve been out enjoying what appears to be the arrival of better weather (if not actually summer yet!) by putting plenty of miles on your scooters. Don’t forget, if you’re planning to ride abroad this year that Scootering has arranged an EXCLUSIVE DISCOUNT with Speeferries for all it’s readers booking online with them. Just visit their website at www.speedferries.com and use the code scoot_1 (Basic tickets) or scoot_2 (flex tickets) to get your 20% discount of each crossing!


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