6/29/03

Today is my 20^th Birthday today and, as expected, the phone rings constantly with gleeful birthday well-wishers. After the requisite tune and congratulations, the conversationπs next step is inevitably into summer plans. Of course some of them have not yet heard: I am riding across the country on a moped.

Here is the skinny: on Tuesday, July 1^st, I will get on my Kinetic TRF and spend the next two months winding my way across the US. I am starting in my hometown, Nyack, New York, and if all goes well, I hope to eventually get to California. From there, I will head back across the country to Colorado Springs, Colorado, in time for the beginning of school.

But my trip is not a race. In the interest of Trip-As-Medium-For-Self-Development, it has become something else entirely. As I ride, I will be creating elements for a book, including photographs, drawings, fiction, non-fiction, and journals from the road. These raw materials will be posted on www.flockoflemmings.com as well as on www.mopedarmy.com and www.cosmotor.com. With the help of my studio art professor, Kate, when I get back to Colorado College in the fall I will compile a book of my work on the road. This is one of the most exciting part of the trip for me because I get to tell my story holistically, through multiple mediaä and bring you all along with me.

I am so excited I can hardly stand it. I have been packing and planning for months, but now I can hardly believe that in only a couple days Iπll be gone! But when I tell people about my trip the reactions are quite varied; some people laugh, some people are shocked, and others are furious. ≥No you are not riding across the country on a moped. Get a motorcycle, get a real machine,≤ someone said the other day. ≥Why a moped?≤

Well, I like mopeds for much the same reason that I like Duck Billed Platypuses: take two practical things, and put them together into one -- that could be considered more practical if you look at it the right way.

A moped is different from most other vehicles. Mopeds are not made to go fast -- they are just made to go. If one were in a hurry to get someplace in particular, a moped would most likely not be your vehicle of choice. But I am not trying to get anywhere in a hurry; I have other priorities. With a top speed of 30mph, and getting 120-150 miles a gallon, I will have to just sit back, enjoy it, pay attention to whatπs going on around me and explore the country in as full a way as I can.

What do I expect?

Well, it is going to be beautiful, it is going to be warm, it is going to be awe-inspiring, it is going to be long, it is going to change my perspective, it is going to be cold, it is going to be tedious, it is going to be rainy, it is going to be lonely, and it is going to be painful. It is going to be an adventure.

Moped Modifications

Cosmopolitan Motors, the company that imports the Kinetic TFR, donated one for the trip. I went down to visit them in Hatboro, Pennsylvania, and they set me up with a beautiful blue TFR, made all the right adjustments and sent me on my way.

But no matter how much I appreciate mopeds, they are not built with long distance touring in mind. Because of this, Quill, a family friend and fantastic mechanical/electrical engineer, helped modify the moped for the trip in hereto unimagined ways:

We decided to replace the stock seat with a seat more appropriate for the task at hand. However, the seat that comes on the TFR is not the most customizable thing Iπve ever seen. In fact it wasnπt customizable at all. Most bicycles have a system that looks like this: a post connected to the seat, and an acceptor tube built into the frame of the bike, with a mechanism for clamping down on the acceptor so that the seatpost canπt slide or turn once itπs in the proper position. The TFR however, had a short post (maybe 2.5 inches) welded the frame of the ped, and a clamp attached to the bottom of the seat that fit over the post and clamped down to anchor it. We could have gotten away with simply taking off the seat, slipping a 3/4 inch bike seatpost and seat into the 1 inch frame post, drilled a hole through the whole shebang and bolted the sucker down, but instead we came up with a more heavy duty solution. Quill chopped off the whole seat post junction and supports from an old mountain bike, cut off the mopedπs post, ground out what was left and welded the bikeπs seatpost junction to the body of the moped. Also this allowed us to put the seatpost at an angle instead of completely vertical. This way, Iπm higher and in a better position to pedal with better leg extensionä a feature that will be essential to getting over small hillsä like Pikeπs Peak for instance.

Second, we realized that we had to work out a way to charge up my electronic devices, a Clie NX60 (a Sony PDA type device for writing and transmitting all this stuff back to the real world), a laptop and a cell phone (for use as a modem for emergencies as well as). There is no battery on the moped. Instead, the energy for powering the lights, spark plug, turn signals etc, is created with a magneto, a mechanism that I have little understanding of, beyond itπs reference to the X-men. In any case we found out the hard way that you canπt just splice a cigarette lighter into the head light wiring because the power generated by the magneto is DC current, not AC. To clean up the current and make it steady enough to charge batteries, we spliced a rectifier and switch into the headlight wires, then spliced it to a cigarette lighter mechanism. Now I can charge all my gadgets with their respective travel chargers instead of hanging around rest stopsä how sweet is that?

Our final modifications were made to accommodate to greater, more stable storage options on the åped. We wound up attaching triangular plates to the front wheel and then mounted baskets to those to stabilize the carriers. In the back we attached brackets that were built to hold panniers (saddle bags) to the back of a bike. In order to make the brackets fit the moped, we bolted on some steel and aluminum extension brackets and supports, which strengthened the back, and allow the panniers to fit on seamlessly.

So as I can feel the minutes tick by towards departure, Iπm more and more excited. Naysayers be damned, I am going on the road.