October 25, 2003

European Vacation Part 8: Scooter Madness!

Saturday morning we woke up after very little sleep and decided, based on the amazing weather, that we were going to rent four scooters and do some island exploring.

chris a, fatty, grant — I don't know if you know this, but Greeks drive like crazy people. Wait, that doesn't quite do it justice. More like FUH-HUH-HUH-KING CAH-RAZY PEOPLE! It makes no sense. You walk around Crete and all you see are these chilled out playas all taking it easy, sipping their coffee, taking their four-hour breaks...but all of a sudden, put one of them chilled dudes behind the wheel of a anything with a motor and all of the sudden they've GOT FUCKING PLACES TO BE SO MOVE OR BE KILLED! With that in mind, full-well knowing that renting scooters on a Greek island might lead to an early death, we decided to head to the restaurant across the street and enjoy what might very well be our last meal:

A full English. Aw yeah.

fatty, grant — Like I mentioned earlier, tourist season had just recently ended, so the place we went to was staffed by only one little old lady. She took our order and then cooked all four of our significant breakfasts all by her little old self. Which was almost as impressive as it was time consuming. Here's a pre-coffee, "cranky n' hungry" portrait of Fatty and Grant.

grant — Then the food shows up and all of a sudden he's jamming wif breffis all koo-dey-la and shit in the Fatty's glasses.

chris a — OG: Original Greek.

Here's a pic of me eating a cucumber (You know, for all the gay fans up in the hizzy. Holla!).

chris a — After we finished eating (around 11:30am) we walked back over to the scooter rental place next to our resort only to find this sign on the door "Be Back at 16:00!" The place had opened at 10am and by 11:30 (or maybe 11?) the guy working there needed to take a SIX AND A HALF HOUR BREAK. Greek people hate work like a fat kid hates running. After driving around in a car for awhile (and finding that most of the rental places were closed for the season) we finally found a local guy who was nice enough to have us follow him to a small rental shop he knew of down by the water. We plunked down 14 Euros each and BAM! we all got scooters. Here's Chris posing with his.

chris a, grant, me — Heltmets? Check. We had originally planned on driving west to a nearby city called Hania but when we looked more carefully at the map, we realized it was over 75 km away (which is really far by scooter). So we instead decided to head to Balí, a small beach town about 35 km away.

The circle in the middle is our resort (outside of Rethymnon), the circle on the left is Hania, and the circle on the right is Balí.

fatty, grant — We hit the road and were headed for Balí when about three minutes into the trip Grant's bike stalled out and wouldn't restart. We all pulled over and a quick examination revealed that the liquid puddling underneath his bike was, in fact, gasoline. Yep, blown gas line. No big deal we figured. We'd all ride back and get Grant a new bike. Chris hopped on his bike to come with us, and his bike wouldn't restart either. FUCK! So Fatty and Chris agreed to wait 1/2 mile down the road while Grant and I went back to talk to the scooter guy.

We got back to the scooter place (and please keep in mind that we'd literally been gone for about four minutes) only to find that the scooter rental guy had gone, that's right, you guessed it, ON SIESTA! Here's a picture of my acute disdain. Luckily for us, the people in the shop nextdoor asked what the problem was and when we told them what had happened, they called the scooter guy on his cell phone and he came back and hooked us up with new bikes.

fatty, grant — Grant was pretty spooked about the broken gas line. His grandmother had once told him "Whatever you do, DON'T ride a moped in Greece! Promise me, ok?" and he felt like it was a sign that he shouldn't get back on the bike. But we told him, "Stop being silly. She said MOPED in GREECE! You're on a SCOOTER in CRETE! Apples and oranges, my friend! It's totally different! Stop being such a pussy!"

grant — Our cajoling managed to get him down the coastal road for the first ten kilometers of our trip - but when the small country lane we were riding on ended and it became apparent that we'd have to ride on the big, four-lane highway for the remainder of our trip, he was decidedly unhappy. We gave him another pep talk ("You're on a SCOOTER, remember? Scooter! Not moped!") and hit the big, bad highway.

grant, me — Turns out, the highway was way less scary than the little road we'd been riding through town. On the little road, we were forced to ride in the sketchy, pothole ridden shoulder, where we constantly had to worry about cars pulling out in front of us and dogs that were running around in the street. But on the highway there was hardly any traffic and the shoulder was wide and smoothly paved. (By the way, you know you totally love my wind-styled Farrah Fawcett wings. They're the latest in cycling fashion.)

fatty — Biiiiiiig guuuuuuuuy on a liiiiiiiiiitle biiiiiiiiike!

fatty — Twenty minutes later, we made it to the first of Balí's beaches. Here's Fatty taking in the view from the road.

fatty, me — Hahaha. What's better than Fatty's camo helmet by LAZER?

chris a — After we were finished taking in the view, we decided it was high time that we took some shots of each of us pimping and coldlamping on our HOGGZ!

chris a — First up is Chris. Here he is demonstrating the pose called "Care Free Cowboy."

chris a — And here's "Stone Cold Player."

chris a — And my personal fave: "Kiss me, I'm Greek."

grant — Next up: Tha Grizza. This one's called "Howdjoo know I was looking atchoo if you weren't looking at me? Oh!"

grant — Uhhhhh....I don't even know what to write here. Please feel free to use the "Comments" section below to name this pose for me. Thanks.

fatty — Fatty elected to kick it old school with a famous standby: "JC Penny Catalog Coldlamp #427."

Now here's the section where I would've posted the pics of me c-lampin' on my bike, but they don't exist. (I gave Grant my new cam to take pics of me and he thought the beeping noise my new cam makes each time it autofocuses meant that it was taking pics. He feels really bad and was worried that I was going to be all shitty about it here. But hey, it was an honest mistake.) So instead, here's another scenery pic (looking east). Wooo! After our photo sesh, we decided to head down to the beach and take a swim before checking out the rest of the Balí coastline.

Here's a pic from down on the beach facing west.

The first thing we did on the beach was make sure we staked out a location near the topless Scandinavian girls that was close enough to see their boobies clearly but not so close that Grant's staring would get us in trouble.

Here's Grant pretending to read a book while he gets his long-term leer on. Awwww, yeah. (Yo, check out my fancy new camera's PEEP-O-RAMA zoom. Sweet, right?)

Oh, and did I forget to mention that we'd packed a frisbee?

chris a — All these pics are from Fatty's cam. Here's Chris going for a behind the head catch.

chris a — Kudos to the Fatty for managing to catch...

grant — ...this pic of Grant making the best "running to catch something" face in the history of sports.

Here's me at laughing at Grant getting mad at Fatty for taking funny pictures of him.

grant — If you've ever played Frisbee with Grant, you'd know that he thinks he's Michael Jordan. Seriously. Instead of ever just taking a few steps back to catch the frisbee, he'll stay exactly where he is and try to jump and catch it. Since Grant is 68" tall, the letter "a" here represents approximately 36" (a little more half of his body). The letter "b" represents the approximate reach of Grant's arms outstreched. And the letter "c" represents the remaining 33" of pure vertical leap he'd require to catch the frisbee. Somebody get this kid a trampoline.

After a quick dip, we packed up our stuff, bid a final farewell leer to our topless friends, and headed back to our hoggz to continue exploring the rest of Bali's coastline

chris a, me — While Chris and I goofed around with our cameras,

fatty, grant — Grant and Fatty took a quick ride to pick up some snacks and drinks at a nearby store.

And then after regrouping, we hopped on our scooters and drove up this crazy road that hugged the mountainous coastline of the Bali peninsula.

As the road continued to climb higher, the view got crazier and crazier.

fatty — What started out as a quick stop to snap some pics of the view...

grant, me — ...quickly digressed into another Sears' Catalog-inspired photo shoot. "Look! Over there!" "No! Look over there!"

You thought we took a lot of pictures before? Throw in the novelty of helmets and it was a veritable photographic orgy.

grant — I'm not sure if he's flexing or if he's pretending to be a little teapot, short and stout.

chris a, grant — And now here's our Quadrophenia inspired SCOOTERGANG shots.

chris a, fatty, grant — How tough is the Fatty in this pic? See that drop off behind Fatty in the pic? That's actually a steep road that leads down to this little tiny part of the penninsula that goes out into the water. We drove down to explore and take a closer look.

chris a, me — We parked our bikes and Chris and I set out on foot to check it out.

Down near the water there were all these neato caves, but we were losing light and didn't have time to climb down and go swimming in them (besides the fact that EVERYONE knows that giant octopi live in caves and if you went in there you'd totally be asking for it.) Oh, by the way, right before we left, while kidding around, I actually almost drove my scooter right off the edge of this cliff into the water. My last words (which were captured on videotape) would've been "My name is Rick!"

Check out the SPECIAL BONUS VIDEO!

best ˆ scooter ˆ video

grant — Grant Stoddard: Stunt Driver!

On the scooter ride back towards Rethymnon, we saw this really neat, little roadside Chapel and pulled over to explore. These were all over the place in Crete. Little Chapels that you can just pull over and pray in. The best we could figure, they were there so when a crazy Greek driver kills a tourist on a scooter they can immediately pull over and make pennance.

We popped in and humbly offered alms to St. Dimitri, the Greek patron saint of spared scooterists.

Forget Quadrophenia, we're taking this one back to the James Dean era. Here's Grant's portrait of me as "Rebel Without A Clue."

chris a, grant, me — Afterwards we walked around the surrounding area...

...spend some time taking in the smell of olive trees and eucalyptus and enjoying the Cretan sunshine and the amazing view...

grant — ...and then we peed all over everything and hit the road! By the way, how amazing is it that as soon as Grant is off his scooter and that helmet's taken out of context, he's instantly transformed from "Quadrophenia" to "special-needs escapee from the short bus."