I’m excited to announce I’ve just opened my first scooter store, where you can buy scooter stuff that’s just fun… tee shirts, ball caps, sweatshirts, even a mouse pad or tote bag!

I’m doing the store in partnership with CafePress, an online company that’s been delivering items like this for years. They’re reasonably priced and have wonderful customer service.

I’ve got 4 different lines of scooter stuff, some of it whimsical, and some of it using my logo from the website. If you join My Scooter Space, you might want to get something in that line (like the cap to the left) to proclaim your membership.

If you’re not interested, that’s fine. But for people who like this sort of thing, take a gander at the Motor-Scooters-Guide Store.

In the future, I hope to add more scooter merchandise to the store, perhaps with fun sayings about scooters, scootin’, and scooting folk. Feel free to send me suggestions, if you have them (or requests). Meanwhile, here are a few previews of what you’ll find at the store…

I’ve been building a site about gas scooters for around 7 months now, with a bit of a break during the winter months, when scooting wasn’t in the forefront of my mind & I was dealing with some family health crises. When I started the site, I had 2 goals:

• To share my passion for scooters with others
• To provide an authoritative resource guide for people thinking of buying motor scooters and also for people who had already bought one but wanted to learn how to get the most out of it

It was a tall order, but I’m having a blast. There are so many things I can write about, but one of the most frequent searches I’m seeing that are bringing people to my site are around licensing in the various states for scooters. So, I already had a page on my site that talked in general about scooter licensing. And it has a link to another scooter site that has links to each state.

But that’s a lot of clicking and I want my site visitors to have as easy a time of it as possible. So I thought it would be helpful to build a page about each state that contained a quick & dirty summary of what’s needed. So far, I’ve built 3 state pages:

• Idaho (my state, so that was easy)
• Alabama
• Indiana

But I still have 47 states to go, so obviously that will take a while for me to research & write all those pages. So, I thought I’d put a request out there to anyone reading this blog… What states should I make a priority to do next? Tell me where you are & what you need to know, and I’ll do my best to accommodate! You can use the comments link above to post your requests.

Also, I wanted to let you know that I’ve started a new community at my scooter website called “The eScooter Club.” Please stop by and check it out. You can build your very own page about you and your scooter, complete with photos. It’s easy & fast… and FREE! Here’s my eScooter Club profile page. Enjoy!

Ooh we! Genuine Motor Scooters has made some exciting changes in their Buddy line this year. Almost makes me wish I’d waited to buy mine… almost. :)

First off, their color line is almost completely different. Black is still in there, but it no longer has the silver accents. Also, the pink and the cream are gone. Red, which was experimental last year, is now mainstreamed. There’s a new light blue and a seafoam green. The one in the pic above that looks school bus yellow to me they’re calling orange, but it’s definitely NOT last year’s true orange! All the vintage styling is still there. In addition, they’re claiming improved performance, though I didn’t see any details on that.

PLUS… what was a limited edition last year, my Series Italia, has now become a whole new line of Buddy, the Buddy International! It now comes in 3 color choices, one of which is still the olive green you see in the header above, and these are the other 2:

The blue combo is called the St. Tropez and the red is the Pamplona. Besides the new colors, the Buddy International’s engine has been bumped up from 125cc to 150cc for a little more oomph. With the whitewall tires and air horn, this Buddy is really appealing. Oh, and one other thing… the Series Italia Buddy now comes in the little 50cc size too, so if a full-powered Buddy is too much scooter for you, you can still have sharp styling and retro looks with what Genuine is calling the “Little Italia”.

So… is a Buddy in your future for 2008? For more information, and reviews, visit this Buddy page on my site.