Scootering Across the Country

Some people bird-watch. Some people ride scooters. Some people ride scooters a very long way.

Rob dates his scooterphilia to 1999, when he saw one in a San Diego shop window. "I decided I needed to have it for some reason," he said.

Mike was into motocross motorcycles when he was a teenager. Those mudslinging vehicles don't make much sense in a city -- he and Rob live off U Street NW -- so he got into scooters.

"I think scooters are dirt bikes for city rednecks," Mike said. Both enjoy machines they can tinker with.

They have planned the trip with the discipline of a military campaign. The route will stay off the interstates and follow the Oregon Trail much of the way. Support vehicles will follow them. They have even plotted the elevations along the journey, an important consideration as their carburetors gasp in the thinner air.

Some of the 32 Cannonball riders are using the rally to raise money. Rob's riding for the American Cancer Society; Mike, a former member of the 82nd Airborne, for the Special Operations Warrior Foundation, a group that provides scholarships for the children of special ops personnel killed on the job. (You can get info at http://www.wmasa.org/cannonball/ .)

Their scooters left yesterday on a truck for Oregon. Rob and Mike will fly out Thursday. For Rob, this is a bit of unfinished business. Two years ago, he came within 300 miles of completing the first Scooter Cannonball, which went from east to west. On the Arizona-California border, he was rear-ended by a tractor trailer. Rob broke his left hand and his right ankle.

Even so, he has great memories of the trip. On a scooter, a foot off the ground, you're not very far from the world around you. You're riding through it, not past it.

"We're going to get some funny looks rolling through Nebraska," Rob admitted.

Said Mike: "We're doing it because it's not supposed to be done."

Godspeed, gentlemen.