Scoots raved in the New York Times!

A not-so-recent article was published in the October 22 printing of the New York Times in which our friends at South Bay Scooter Club were highlighted. Hats off to our fellow riders. Check out the article when you get a chance (click here). It's informative, it's about scoots, and it's worth the read. Keep living the dream!

The Scoot Capital of the Nation

In June 2008, Becky and Lauren went on a short excursion to Catalina Island not necessarily knowing a ton about it. We knew it was very small, a little historic, and generally relaxing, but we knew little of what was in store for us. We took a boat over from Long Beach, got into town and settled, rented a bike and started exploring. We quickly realized how small the little town of Avalon is and noticed there were very very few cars crowing the streets, but instead mostly golf carts and low and behold, scoots. Apparently Avalon controls the size and number of vehicles by requiring a permit for all forms of transportation and limiting the number of cars, thus forcing people to ride around on golf carts and scoots or other modes of transportation. Note "forcing" is used extremely lightly here. Do you really need to pull someones leg to Live the Dream on a daily basis on their small homeland of an island? Homey don't play that! Seeing a scoot on the streets of 805 is exciting enough to lose control of the wheel, but seeing them at every corner and parked on every street in Catalina was truly heavenly. We obviously documented, making it our mission to capture each and every scoot that we saw, including a Rascal. We had some mixed reactions. A large man on a Ruckus loved that two girls on a tandem bicycle were checking him out. Even when he realized that we were solely interested in his scoot, he loved and appreciated our enthusiasm.

Opposite end of the spectrum was the lovely and elderly owner of the Red Elite with the army sticker on his.....well, hm, I suppose on a scoot it's technically the windshield.

We tried documenting him in action, but didn't want his scowl in the frame. Later in the day we saw it parked on the street and snuck in a shot. Click here (LTD in Catalina) and enjoy the variety; truly a different scoot for every personality type.

LTD.

The Birth of LTD

It has become that time. LTD has been established for a couple years now and we are only just getting to this blog. I suppose this is mostly for our own benefits, but maybe even for the lone scooterists out there looking to get involved in even the smallest way, or scoot for fun just a little more often. Its pretty simple, really. We love scooters, we love our scooters, and we love scooterists. We are well aware of those of you who think this may be a little silly, maybe even a little much. It seems though that we have heard it all, and honestly, we are left unfazed. There are plenty of scooter clubs out there that have been started for Vespa only or Vintage scoots. LTD was founded on the idea that scooterists, no matter what they are riding, should hang out every now and then - to talk scoots, share stories, or even just do a bit more exploring on the side streets of their own backyards. There are no rules, there are no regulations - we don't jump in new members (as we've been asked before).

This idea basically spread like wildfire among friends. Some close friends got a scoot, everyone took a test ride and was hooked pretty much immediately thereafter. We had our very first "meeting" at a local Denny's and invited anyone who wanted to come. As you can see from our picture, we got a good handful of people there to talk about decals, business cards, future rallies and rides, and hopes for LTD in the future. We had some great feedback from friends who don't even own scoots, even from our waitress. We gave our friends some test rides out in the parking lot (to plant the seed of course), and headed out for a ride around Thousand Oaks, putting the very first LTD meeting officially in the books.