head to the hills 9
Monday, April 26th, 2010Early Saturday morning, I headed over to the East bay for the annual Head To The Hills rally on Gail, my 1964 Vespa GL. Alan told me about this ride, which runs for about 125 miles through some awesome twisty canyon roads. I’ve heard good things about the twisties in the east bay for awhile now, so this seemed like a perfect time to check them out.
Of course, in order to get over to the East bay, I had to cross the Bay Bridge, which, on a 46 year old 160cc scooter, is a tad daunting. I hopped on the 101 at the Bryant street on-ramp (the left side carpool one), which was nice because it dumps you nicely into the right-hand slow lane. There wasn’t much traffic, and soon enough, I was cruising happily at about 60mph. Even so, it was a little scary to not have any more power to go to in case I needed to get out of trouble. Also, the grooves in the pavement made the scoot wiggle nervously as we crossed the bay. Eep.
I made it to West Oakland without incident, and Alan and I rode over to Cole Coffee to meet up with the rest of the crew. In all, about 20 scooters came on the ride. Mostly vintage Vespas and Lambrettas, but a few modern plastic scoots (the retro looking-ones) joined us, in addition to a pair of of the goofy-looking new MP3s. And, as Alan pointed out, for some reason, scooter rallies always have one old, pot-bellied dude in sweatpants, riding a Ruckus. Great.
I don’t have any pictures from the ride itself — it was way too fast and twisty to even attempt to get the camera out. Oh well. I did have my Garmin 305 with me though, so I was able to map out the ride:
We stopped for lunch down in Pleasanton. Yes, in case you’re wondering, Pleasanton is very.. pleasant.
The craziest part of the ride was through Morgan Territory Road. On the east side of Mt. Diablo, it’s a one-lane road through some gorgeous hilly country — here’s a video of someone driving it on YouTube). So yah, imagine riding that road in a line of 20 scoots at a decently fast clip. It was pretty awesome.
As to be expected with any vintage rally, we had two scoots need to board the “shame train” with mechanical problems — one was a modern scoot, and the other was the ride leader Derek’s GS — whose rear wheel nearly came off due to a loose axle nut (yah, that would have been a lot worse, considering we had just finished riding Morgan Territory Road).
To get back to SF, I hopped on the highway right near Cole Coffee. Thankfully, there was a ton of traffic, so even though I had to merge from the 24 to the 580 to the 80, I was able to lane split my way through stopped traffic all the way to the tollbooths.
In all.. the ride took nearly 7 hours and went over 130 miles. Thanks to FLCSC for organizing an awesome ride.
In other scooter news, Andy and I started cleaning up the 1976 150 Super that’s been sitting idle in our garage for nearly a decade now… we really should have taken a “before” picture, but she’s looking really good now:
See you at Scooter Rage 24 in June.
