London, England

As promised here is the last diary entries on our trip. I am in the process of creating a "debrief" for those interested in the technical details (e.g. Insurance, tips, etc). I am also in the process of making my Vespa in Australia a custom tourer, ready for the Dubbo scooter run (812Km away). I will add details to the Internetscooter Project page, so keep an eye on that if you are interested in making your scooter a super tourer :)

London, England, Wednesday (1/06/05)

We are now back at our starting point, back with our friends in London. The scooters made it fine, the damage report below...

- 7,000+ Km added to clock (Vespa speedo error taken into account)
- Laura's left wing mirror feel off (looks like it was damaged before we left)
- Scratches to Laura's front guard and side panel (from falling off stand twice)
- Scratches added to in Laura's scooter by Brighton wankers
- Loads of dead bugs
- Luggage system a bit wobbley but still secure and intact (better brackets required next time)
- One flat tyre

To fill in the rest of the details between Paris and London, here is the poop...


Rouen, Monday

We left from Paris after doing some scooter shopping at Department Scooter. Hmmm, probably the least friendly service that we had in France, maybe we should have turned up on the packed up scooters or maybe they weren't bothering to rip us off like the hotel did. Anyway Laura got her Paris Vespa legwarmer for her scooter, a very good souvenir.

We then headed to Rouen via a Versailles and a green road. Versailles was mostly closed but we got to do a turn around the gardens (or at least a portion of them). Very impressive even with the fountains turned off and the maintainence trucks driving around.



The green road that we took this time was a bad one. Loads of small villages, one after the other and no road signs as to how to get to the next. What should have been a short pleasant trip took about 6 hours. We got to Rouen and did not do much after but eat and go to bed.


Brighton, Tuesday

Checkout time was 11:30, so we did a quick 1 hour tour of Rouen in the morning. We packed up and then headed for Dieppe, worried about not being able to get on the 4:30PM ferry to Newhaven. We got there by 12:30PM and with some ummming and erring by the ticket person we were booked.

We did another 1 houir tour and had one last quatre fromage pizza in France. We were on the ferry by 3:45PM and found that it was a pretty shitty ferry compared to the one over.



We go into Brighton late and the first places we tried were booked out. After following some suggests from the hostel, we got a room around 9:30pm.


London, Last leg

We parked the scooters in a motorcycle parking spot a few streets away. The next day we found that both Laura and my scooter had been kicked over!!! The scooters either side were left alone (or their owners had also found the kicked and righted them). Needless to say Brighton is not on my favourite list, we had travelled 7,000Km+ without incident but less than 12 hours in Brighton we had vandals attack our scooters for no reason. Fortunately, my scooter which had no damage to start with, was saved by the back box and Laura's was only scratched on top of.the previous scraps.

We righted the scooters and then did a quick tour of Brighton. We saw the mesuem where the local Vespa club had a display to try and show that Vespa's were not evil (i.e. There were Vespa's before Mod riots). The museum was good but the vandals left a bad taste in my mouth (no sticker bought to advertise that I had been there).

Next we took the short road back to London, with the long treck across London to Niall's... Our journey over!