Denied! no riding for scootergrrl today.

I'm a bit frustrated ...with myself and the weather. Our driveway has turned into an ice skating rink due to the roaring winds and successive snow falls and compaction. Plus, I just could not come up with a safe way to push the scooter up a steep ramp onto the truck bed.

First I spent a half hour with a hair dryer warming up and scraping out the ice covered junk in the holes with the tie-downs (Dodge has since redesigned these tie-down points). I know I had cleaned them out in January so my guess is the local chipmunks are storing bark and twigs in these perfectly sized holes as an emergency food cache. I digress.

Then I backed up the truck up the driveway, trying to find the optimal angle to create the optimal height (tailgate is as low as possible) which is still bloody high. When the scooter is on the truck bed the handlebars are way over my head which means at some point I have to climb up onto the truck bed... how? A parallel ramp to walk up? I saw a one advertisement of a motorcycle ramp where they used a step stool to help load the cycle and thought I could do that.

Now, if I were really motivated, I would shovel a path through 4 vertical feet of snow from the house through our snow drift and create a flat ramp to roll the scooter onto the truck bed. This has not happened but it might after this experience… read on.

I unlock the scooter, start her up just to make sure everything is ok and then my husband and I start pushing... and quickly I realize I'm banging into the wall of the house, tripping over the *#!*% downspout...and rocks to hold down the downspout, the deck struts and finally we've got the scooter completely on the ramp. The handlebars are over my shoulders...

and I'm stepping onto a step-stool which is sitting on a quarter inch of dirt that we’ve sprinkled onto the 2 inches of ice... with my foot literally in mid-air and the scooter heeling over at a strong angle, finally my cautious side overcomes my desire to load the scooter. A vision flashes through my head – physics 101 scenarios of the angle of force from my stepping onto the step-stool, coupled with the frictional resistance of four tiny one-inch feet of the foot stool, minus the coefficient of friction of ice once the smear factor of dirt has been overcome – and I’m envisioning the stool sliding under the truck, me flipping onto my back with the scooter landing onto my belly. oUCH.

At this point, I pitch a verbal fit about the unfairness of this all, Bob pitches fit about how he's mentioned that we have 6 months of winter (like I had forgotten) ... and we carefully roll the scooter off the ramp and back to her protected parking spot. Upon further analysis, our loading process is flawed. My next method will be to bribe friends with a trailer to haul my bike down to Boulder so I can go riding in March or maybe I’ll dig that trench after all. It’s good exercise.