After a few glitches, the site and the forum is now fully functional. Hope this will be the last of that.

Now let’s ride!

The Vespinoy forum is experiencing technical problems. We hope to have it resolved as quickly as possible.

Thank you very much for your patience!

Dave Mangano of SCTRCST.COM was gracious enough or at least brave enough to have me and John Rana of Who Rides A Vespa? back on his podcast and this time together! As you can imagine we had a blast doing the interview as you can hear in this episodes introduction. After 10 tries we finally got the intro right.

We spoke about a lot of things and just generally had fun with Dave.

Listen to the podcast:

Download the podcast here.

Visit Dave’s site here.

Just wanted to share some photos from our long ride last week.

My Vespa GT on Dalton Pass, Nueva Ecija. A really wonderful stretch of mountain roads, lots of twisties and really really cold. We had to stop here to answer the call of nature and to put on our rain gear to cut down on the wind chill.

During a gas break after entering Tuguegarao. You can see my GT is anything but white by this time.

Along the hi-way in Cagayan. Kilometers of wide open roads, sweeping turns and breathtaking views. This road eventually led us to the Magapit Hanging Bridge and the Buntun Bridge. Read more about them and other attractions of Cagayan here.

Being the last group to arrive in Pagudpud, Ilocos Norte. We barely had time to take pictures on the famous Patapat Bridge. Really a beautiful place to shoot photos and to ride. It was getting dark fast so we had to get out of there right away.

My GT and the customary photo op at the Bangui Wind Farm. I was surprised at how big these wind turbine generators were. These things are MASSIVE. The wind in this place is strong and steady. We had to hide the helmets behind the top boxes or underneath the seats since they kept getting blown off the bikes. Cool place…..literally.

Another shot at the Bangui Wind Farm.

After roughly 1,300 kilometers of travelling, Euroscoot‘s 2008 Ride which followed the reverse Northern Luzon Loop (Manila-Nueva Ecija-Nueva Vizcaya-Tuguegarao-Isabela-Pagudpud-La Union-Manila) I finally got home at around 6 pm Sunday evening, tired, dirty and smelling it.

It was one of the toughest rides, physically, I have ever been on. The Vespa GT performed flawlessly. I got it us high as 130 kmh on the long stretches of Isabela before finally giving way to good old fashioned fear. The GT could handle more, but I could not, no need to go that fast when you have 400 kms of open road in front of you.

I will leave it to the rest of the guys who joined the trip, as well as the other club members who went on a parallel ride (VCOP and Scoot 66) doing the Northern Loop, to share their stories. It’s too much of an experience for just one person to tell.

Forum discussion regarding the ride here.

Thanks to direkyey for the photo!