It seemed like a good idea at the time, set out this morning on a 15 mile ride up to the Vespa dealership to look at a paint issue on the scooter and then over to Sears to pick up a water filter for the refridgerator…

Even though it’s supposed to be a million degrees today (ok around 100) I’d be there and back before it got really, really, skin charring, pavement melting hot right?

It started well too, it was a little warm heading to the dealership, but not at all uncomfortable.  Definately a nice ride up.  When I got to the dealership they even had good news for me, the top box that we’ve been waiting 2 months for FINALLY showed up.

But it went downhill from there… rapidly…

Let’s see, first there was the long awaited box…  the bolster cushion on it while not supposed to be the same as our suede seat, should at least have been a similar tan color just made of a different material…  It wasn’t, instead of tan it was black.  While it wasn’t what I had originally wanted, it didn’t look bad and lets face it, it took two months for this box to come in, who knows how long it’s would take for another one to show up!

So they move the bike to try and clean it and install the box, and discover that the rear tire was flat (I thought it was riding squirrely on the way over ;) ) when I looked closer at the tire, I discovered that there was actually a staple in the tire!  While the dealership has spare tires, they don’t service bikes, which meant I had to head somewhere else to try and get the tire replaced.

So I buy my tire, which by the way doesn’t fit in the box or anywhere on the scooter, and haul it up to the motorcycle service place they recommend.  The tire was in a paper shopping bag which as I discovered wasn’t up to the task of withstanding the strain as one of the straps broke as I rode to the service place.

Knowing that changing a tire on a car is a pretty simple task, I figured 30 minutes and off I’d go.  Nahh, my scooter which in it’s current state wasn’t exactly safe to ride couldn’t be worked on by these guys until FRIDAY!  Mind you it’s currently Saturday, so the bike would have to sit 6 days before they could work on it.   So now it’s off to formulate plan B as I’m telling these guys what they can do with themselves until Friday for what they say is an hours worth of work…

As the ambient air temperature continues to climb, The Wife loads The Boy into the car to at the very least come and get the tire so I don’t have to kill myself trying to get the scooter and tire home.  While they head up to me, I find the nearest Napa autoparts and get a can of Fix a Flat so that the tire will at least hold enough air pressure so that I can safely get it home.

In the Napa parking lot (as the air temperature rises past at least 700 degrees) while trying to connect up the tire patching goo can to the tire value I come face to face (or rather back of the palm to muffler) with the biggest design flaw on the Vespa.  The engineer who thought that it was a good idea to put the tire valve on the rear tire all of 2 inches away from the muffler, the HOT muffler, needs to be beaten to a barely recognizable pulp…  That is after he experiences the joys of receiving second degree burns on your hand as you try to take the cap off the tire valve stem!

Finally after meeting up with The Wife, it was time to head home.  By now the air temperature had hit at least 1500 degrees (the thermometer in the car said 112, but I think it just melted at that temperature), and I got to learn what it was like to ride through a blast furnace.  The coolest parts of that ride felt like I had a hair dryer blowing on me, on high…  the warmest parts of that ride were truely painful…

And some stooges still try and tell me that you don’t need air conditioning in our town because it doesn’t get that hot!