If you read the wife’s blog, you’ll know that she was at Motorcycle School last week, that’s right motorcycle safety classes to ride our scooter…

In reality not a bad thing, we learned a lot about technique and a little bit about what our limits as riders our and the limits of our scooter (aka what not to do while riding). However being a more motorcycle centric class I think I also learned more about motorcycle shifting than I really cared to know….

For the most part the class was uneventful, although I did have a few characters, meet them by clicking below…

Take for instance Brenda… At 5′0 (if even that) she decided that it was time for her to get a motorcycle. Since she has 0 riding experience, she wisely choose to attend the safety course before purchasing her first bike… However, she also doesn’t have any experience with a manual transmission, and the mysteries of shifting and riding without stalling were not revealing themselves to her. This led her to be very timid on the bike, and when she realized that the scooters have automatic transmissions Brenda started to wonder if a motorcycle was the right set of wheels for her…. However, Brenda also made it clear that she would only be happy is she had one of the biggest scooters on the market… Which oh by the way has about 4 times the power of the motorcycle she used in class and could barely control it… Brenda’s aspirations will be delayed though, during the second skills evaluation she laid the bike down which is an automatic failure…

Then there was Donna, who also came in at a hair over 5′0. Donna purchased a used Vespa scooter for herself a few weeks ago, and has already laid it down. Even though she has the medium sized Vespa, with her inexperience riding when she got her scooter, she ended up laying it down not long after she got it home… However, unlike most riders who lay their bikes down, she wasn’t moving! She just sort of fell… I think she learned a lot though, not only did she pass, but in my opinion she was showing a lot more confidence when she rode by the end of the weekend.

We were also joined by Tim, who was planning on getting a scooter with his wife. He plans on getting a very large scooter because it’s the only way they can save face with his wife’s family who are all Harley riders…

Finally there was Sue. Sue only spent one day with us, she was supposed to take the two classes with our group but instead had to take yesterday’s classes in the afternoon. That’s because Sue showed up without any of the required gear, Sue didn’t realize that she didn’t have what she needed until after she arrived at the site, looked around and realized that she wasn’t dressed like the rest of us. Despite instructions that we needed long sleeve shirts and over the ankle boots, Sue “forgot” and showed up wearing a pair of flip flops and a t-shirt… The meant her husband had to drive 45 minutes to the site with the gear she was supposed to have in order to start with the afternoon class…

Initially I chalked this up to simple absent mindedness, that is until she joined up with our class this morning. For almost every single exercise, despite being giving a detailed briefing on what was expected of us, AND having a riding coach ride the exercise for us so we could see how it worked… Sue managed to NOT follow directions. Sue would finish an activity and just toodle off to… Well nobody’s sure just where she’d be headed to when they’d stop her. Somehow, despite her overall inattentiveness she managed to pass her tests… Go figure…

Oh, and me… I passed, I screwed up on one riding section and lost a few points. The other section I was told that my form was really good and I handled the bike well, but I was faster than they were looking for on the range… so I lost some points… Go figure…