I know this is getting ahead of myself, but I’ve been thinking about where I might go after riding around Lake Michigan to Wisconsin. I have a few ideas.

Michigan also has an east coast, along Lake Huron. Unless you count right at the Straits of Mackinac, I’ve never even seen Lake Huron, which is a bit wrong, I’d say. To remedy that, I could ride up the middle of the Lower Peninsula, down the Huron coast to Lake St Clair, then back home across the palm.

Although I’ve driven through some of it on the way to Isle Royale, there’s a big chunk of the western UP I’m missing on a scooter. I could take the Badger back to Wisconsin, then head north and west to explore the Porcupine mountains and environs, then take the Badger back.

There’s a whole stretch of territory in the “wrist” of the state, along the borders with Ohio and Indiana. That would be more about the travel than the scenery or destinations, but I could see that being worth it, working in a detour to Amish country in northern Indiana.

I’ve quickly mapped these routes and they leave out only about a dozen counties, which I could easily pick up on a ride up the fingers to the eastern UP and back down, also places worth going.

Any one of these trips would take me about a week, the same amount of time as the trip I currently have planned. They’d involve fairly little duplication of places visited. And the notion of visiting every county in the state over the next several years is kinda neat. Sounds like a goal.

One of the things I knew I wanted to do before the big scoot was to make sure I could kick-start my scooter. The battery isn’t very powerful and the starter sometimes seems like it’s barely up to the job, and the last thing I want is to find myself alone somewhere with a drained battery and no way to jump-start the bike.

I got a chance to try it when I accidentally left the power “on” with the bike sitting for a couple days. The battery still had enough juice to power the brake light and the fuel gauge, but not enough to run the starter. Time to start kicking.

I tried over and over, for half an hour last night. I know that people often have trouble getting the knack for it, but I’ve also been told it “isn’t that hard”, so I knew I’d get the hang of it eventually. I tried kicking with different legs from different angles, but the best I got was to briefly light up the headlight and speedometer, and the engine maybe sounding like it was thinking of running. Finally, my shirt soaked in sweat, and sore in a few spots where I’d bumped the scooter, I gave up. I couldn’t get it.

Then someone online suggested that I try giving it some extra gas, so this morning I walked outside, put the key in the ignition, turned on the scooter’s power, twisted the throttle just a little to give it more fuel, and kicked the starter once. It ran.

It then stalled, so I kicked it one more time and it ran again, then stalled. I had to ride it several blocks before I could let it idle without threatening to stop. But after a few miles of riding and then a leisurely lunch with a friend, the starter worked like a charm. So check another box on the pre-flight checklist: I can kick-start the scooter.