Two-wheeled Porn

The Amerivespa scooter rally was heald in Seattle this year. It was total and unapologetic smut. I have never seen so many beautiful bikes in one place in my life. As a scooterist on the road, I feel like a freak and have to ride very assertively in traffic. So pulling into the parking lot with literally thousands of scooters was like arriving at the Land of Misfit Toys. Everyone's a freak.

This bike stole the show -- a cotton-candy pink Hello Kitty-themed Stella with a side car. My fingertips were filled with ache walking along row after row of custom Rallys and new Vespa GTS scooters, with detailing like blue and silver flame jobs.

Though my Superstella held her own. I'm proud of her. It was a riot to pull up to a stop light and hear a two-stroke rumble as a guy pulls up next to me and says, "You going somewhere?" jokingly, cause we're a block from the rally. He was having a hard time finding it so he followed me over. When I was about to leave, one of the group rides was taking off so I got on the tail end for a few blocks. Let me tell you, the assholes in giant SUVs behave a little bit differently toward you when there's a swarm of 50 rat bikes decked out in skulls with riders smoking cigarettes, wearing shirts that say things like FUCK HONDA on them. Man, it was a trip.

And although I obviously understand the pro-Vespa/Stella/Lambretta sentiment, I don't enjoy the elitist attitudes about scooters of "foreign" makers. The funny thing is, these days it's impossible to even tell where the hell your bike was made cause factories contract out and buy parts from whoknowswhere, so the "rice bike" slur doesn't really mean anything anymore. Isn't it just about the thrill of two-wheels? Or is that just me? In one of my magazines there's pictures of a Vespa rally in Chicago where they annually light a Honda on fire and drag it through the streets (behind their Asian-made "Italian" scooters). Can't we all just get along?

See the whole shebang on the scooterlust Flickr photostream if that sort of thing does it for you. It certainly does it for me. In fact, I need a cigarette.