12/08/03 Moped Ride

One of the things I miss the most while out on tour has to be a good brainless moped ride, I have been off for a while and for some reason never bothered to get on the moped longer than it takes to get me to Arranda's or Britton's house, but tonight we took them out to see what trouble we could get into, not that we would get into any anymore since my penchant for not drinking has toned me down a tiny bit. We used to do incredibly stupid things with those poor baby blue Honda Expresses, at one time we were convinced that they could do just about anything, and when it rained one night we figured it would be fun to go run them around, our usual destination was a field that happened to have turned into a giant mud pit, or more like a moped motel, once you check in you don't check out. You see the thing about these mopeds is that they don't have a lot of power, so once mud gets stuck between the tire and the splash guard they slow down to a crawl, were talking about 2 horsepower here, horses due for the glue factory, it took us about 3 hrs and 12 beers to get out of that mess, every time we would make some distance we would get sucked into the mud again, needless to say it was great.We went back to the field a few weeks later, it had those huge cinnamon roll hay bales in it that weighed a ton, for one dumb reason or the other I had convinced Britton to help me roll a bunch of them to one spot and arrange them in a circular fashion, using nothing but moped and people power, it took forever, but the thought of people looking out into the field the next morning and finding the hay bales arranged like crop circles was worth it.

Tonight was not as exciting as those, but was good anyway, we took them out to see the progress on a new bridge they were building over the creek, stopped and hung out talking about random stuff as usual and drank tea that my friend Big Bad Becky Jensen sent me, the kind that has Tang and tea and stuff in it, you know holiday tea, or Russian Tea or something, so after talking about gear, music, the encroaching technology breakdown, and anything else that we could think of we attempted to start the mopeds up and go home, but due the infrequent use and the dropping temperature Britton's moped just wouldn't start up. To start a 1980 Honda Express you wind it up, no joking, there is a lever you push down with your foot and manually wind up a spring, that when fully taught you release by pulling the rear brake lever, but this time it was just wind wind wind, and phhhhtttppt, nothing. After some liberal use of gasoline down the throat of the carburetor we were off again, had it not started we would have had to resort to cannibalism I'm sure, after the tea ran out of course, but we are both kind of scrawny so we would probably just walk to Taco Cabana instead, not giving anyone the story to base Alive 2 after.

C.D.