I’ve passed an important milestone in the preparation for my trip: I now have an actual scooter to ride. Picked out, picked up, and paid for.

It’s a Buddy 50, made by (or for, I should say) Genuine Scooter Company of Chicago. The manufacturer is PGO of Taiwan, who make some of the better scooters coming out of capitalist China. I supposed you might label Genuine as just the “importer” of these scooters, since essentially the same scooter is sold by PGO themselves overseas, but Genuine has input into the design, they’re modified for Genuine (e.g. MPH speedos, DOT-compliant turn signals) for the US market, and Genuine distributes, services, and warranties them, so it isn’t that different from buying a Ford made in Korea by Kia, like I did years ago. Much like buying a fuel-efficient auto in the 1990s, this was the closest I could come to buying “domestic”.

The Buddy comes in both 50cc and 125cc models. The 50cc model exists in part to meet the legal limits in most states to be considered a “moped” rather than a “motorcycle”. This means that you don’t need special training and licencing to drive one, registration costs are lower, mandatory vehicle insurance requirements are waived, and you aren’t required to wear a helmet. Well, I’m not an idiot, so I’m still going to wear a helmet, but the rest of those legal loopholes are welcome. So is the better gas mileage (over 100mpg rather than 90mpg). And besides, I don’t want a scooter with an engine big enough to go 60-70mph and ride on the expressway. If I need to go that fast, I want a cage (i.e. a car) with seatbelts and air bags around me, please.

The 50cc model comes off the boat with an artificial speed restriction to limit it to 30mph; that’s what most states require for the “moped” designation. That restriction is pretty easily removed, which lets them go their natural speed of 40mph or so, which is the max speed I’d actually want.

I’m the kind of buyer who does all his “shopping” before he sets foot in a store, so I didn’t rely much on the guidance of a dealer. But I want to give credit where due to “Stew” and Holland Vespa. This dealership is about 40 miles from where I live, and Stew saved me from having to get there to pick up my scoot – which also would’ve make my very first ride an hour-long intercity journey – by delivering it to their just-opened store in Grand Rapids.

Even so, riding the scoot home from the dealer was a bit of a white-knuckle adventure. For one thing, the best way home from there included a road that drivers like to run at near-highway speeds. I don’t have a proper motorcycle helmet yet, just my bicycle helmet. I figured that, if the helmet isn’t even legally required, the bike helmet would be OK until I saved up another paycheck and picked out a scooter helmet. The thing is, bike helmets are designed to catch lots of wind to cool you off… not a big deal at 15mph, but a pretty noticeable drag at 30mph. Plus, I’ll admit it: I just don’t have much experience on two wheels with a motor. It’s going to take some time for me to get a feel for how fast and wide to take corners, for example.

But I have thousands of miles on a bicycle behind me, much of that in traffic, and that gives me some pretty good skills. A lot of new scooterists haven’t ridden a bicycle in years, and riding a scooter is very different from their experience driving a car. For one thing, most of your steering isn’t done with the steering column, but by leaning, using a trick of physics know as “countersteering”. Most cyclists know how this works, even if not consciously. And tricks like how to safely and easily swerve around a pothole are practically reflexes to a cyclist.

Fortunately I have that, plus a few months of commuting ahead of me, which should prepare me for my road trip. Heck, I’ll probably be safer scooting the back roads of the north country than I will be fighting traffic on the streets of Grand Rapids.

With the Michigan economy being in such dire straits, one of the things in the back of my mind lately has been spending my money locally. I couldn’t buy a US-made scooter; there is no such thing. But I bought one made for a US company (Genuine Scooters of Chicago), and I bought it from a West Michigan dealer. Although there are places I want to see in other states and other countries, right now I want to spend my vacation and my vacation dollars in Michigan. I don’t have a lot to spend during this trip, but I’ll be spending it in places where any economic activity is badly needed.

I’ve pretty much settled on an itinerary, as follows:

Day 1: Grand Rapids to Ludington. Pretty familiar territory, but I’ll hug the lakeshore to make the most of it.

Day 2: Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore and the Leelanau Peninsula. I’ve been to Sleeping Bear a couple times in recent years, so rather than stop and camp there; I’ll go on to Leelanau State Park.

Day 3: Grand Traverse Bay to Charlevoix, sleeping at Fisherman’s Island State Park. It’s only about 15 miles as the crow flies, but taking in the entire Grand Traverse Bay shoreline will be a day well spent.

Day 4: Mackinac City, Bridge, and Island. It’s a fairly short ride the rest of the way to Mackinac, which will give me time to make camp at Straits State Park in St Ignace, then spend the afternoon on the Island.

Day 5: West across the UP to Manistique, where I’ll stay at Indian Lake State Park.

Day 6: A detour away from Lake Michigan, up to Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore, which I’ve neglected to see in any of my previous drives through the UP. I’ll be camping on federal land rather than state land here.

Day 7: Through Munising then south through Escanaba, and along Green Bay (the body of water, not the city), staying at J. W. Wells State Park on the bay.

Day 8: Through Green Bay (the city) and on to Manitowoc, where I’ll catch the midnight ferry to Ludington, hopefully getting a few hours of sleep.

Day 9: Ludington to Grand Rapids via the less scenic route, then a nap.

I’ve set a date for my trip, and requested the time off from work. The date was – in the final analysis – a simple decision to make… because I didn’t have much choice.

At my new job, vacation time is gradually accrued as part of their Planned Time Off program. For every two weeks you work full-time, you earn 3 hours of PTO, to use for vacations, personal days, whatever you want to call it. So I did the math to see when I’d have a full week of PTO, and the answer is that I’ll have 42 hours as of Friday, 7th August 2009. I don’t want to wait any longer than I have to, so that’s when I decided to go.

So I put in the PTO request, and it’s official: I have 10-14 August as paid days off. With the weekends before and after added, that means I’ll be on the road 8-16 August.

I’m going to scoot (part way) around Lake Michigan.

At least that’s the plan. I… er… don’t actually have a scooter yet, for example. But I’m getting one. (Update: See About this rider for an explanation of why I got what I got.)

Once I decided to buy a scooter, my mind started to wander, considering the things it would enable me to do (besides my daily commute).  I could take a road trip up north, I mused.  Then I started to do some rough calculations, of speed and distance and range, and it occurred to me that even at a leisurely pace of 100 miles a day, and taking the quieter and slower roads along the lakeshore itself, I could get all the way to Mackinac and back in a week.  Or what if I kept going…?

Well, getting all the way around Lake Michigan would either take too many days or require more time spent riding every day than I really wanted.  But the S.S. Badger runs every day between Manitowoc WI and Ludington MI, providing a nice shortcut across the Great Lake.  Perfect. Total distance (not counting the ferry ride) should be about 1000 miles, a little over 100/day.

I’ve done things sort of like this before.  The summer after graduating from high school, a friend and I did a 6-week 1000-mile bicycle tour of Britain.  More recently I’ve taken a few week-long solo backpacking trips.  This wouldn’t be as physically taxing as either of those, but those past lessons about planning itineraries and packing light seem like good preparation.  Michigan has a great state park system that offers plenty of places to sleep along the way.  I’ve stayed at the state park up in Copper Harbor, before and after my wilderness excursions on Isle Royale, where my neighbors included lots of rolling cottages that will dwarfed my Chevy Metro and one-man tent, and my scooter will look even smaller in comparison. But I’m OK with that.

But the most important thing is that I haven’t done anything quite like this before. I’m a creature of habit, and cautious by both instinct and hard-learned experience. But I have an urge to push myself beyond those comfort zones, and this here is my current challenge.