It was announced yesterday that H2Oi is officially “postponed” until 2018. Due to poor last-minute communication from the organizers, it appears that pretty much everyone is still going, as the hotels are booked and everyone has already put in for the time off, so I don’t imagine it will be much different than normal. With that being said, we are still riding down.
Now that that is out of the way, here’s a quick update on our situation. The technicalities were the first subject that we had to conquer. State-to-state laws vary greatly when it comes to mopeds. The state of Connecticut pretty much requires nothing at all. You can ride them with a regular driver’s license, foregoing registration or insurance due to the engine size (amongst several other criteria which they sort-of meet). However, most of the states that we are going to travel through are not nearly as lax about scooters. Most require them to be registered and insured, and some even require motorcycle licenses. 4 of the 5 of us had licenses going in, but 0 of the 5 had registration or insurance. Not a huge deal; the one guy in the group was able to get in to the 3 day motorcycle endorsement course here in CT, and passed without issue; and most insurance companies will actually insure the scooters easily and very affordably. The slightly complex part is the registration..
Because you don’t need to register anything “under 50cc” in CT, there’s an irritating list of hoops you have to jump through if you want to end up with CT plates on your scooter. In fact, most DMV employees will decline the request since there’s some conflicting information regarding the legality. However, with the help of a motorcycle forum, we discovered that the state of Vermont is more than happy to take your money to register your anything, regardless of where you live, the engine size of the moped, or if you even have all the proper paperwork. Now the real kicker about Vermont is that you can do this all by mail. Send in an envelope with your paperwork and a check and in two weeks they mail you a registration and a license plate. It’s glorious. The only odd part is that some of ours got processed as MDC (motor-driven cycle) plates and some as motorcycle plates, but we aren’t hugely concerned because they’re required to be legally registered, which they are.
What we’re still working on is finalizing our route, and some modifications to make this 16ish hour trip semi-manageable. Expect some more updates by the beginning of next week. It’s about to get interesting..
