The first and last time I rode a scooter was about 15 years ago or so.
The owner of the Triumph dealership that I'd stop by now and then had recently picked up the Aprilia brand at the time, and part of his contract with that brand's holding company Piaggio was that he'd also have to sell and service their line of higher displacement scooters.
And so, on a lark while there one day I asked the owner if I could take that 500cc model out for a short spin. He said sure.
After I hopped on the thing and made my way out of their parking lot, I pulled out into the street and twisted the throttle on that sucker and instantly got up to about 20mph or so.
That's when I pulled in the lever on the left side handlebar in order to engage the clutch and to up-shift to second.
Seems I had forgotten that scooters in general have an automatic transmission, and that that hand lever sittin' over there on the left side, at least on this Aprilia model, was actually a brake lever.
And so, and because of course scooters in general also don't have a gas tank sitting between your knees like motorcycles generally do and thus a place in which one can sandwich their knees against while riding them and feel more a part of what they're riding, I almost shot right through that scooter's windshield while attempting AND succeeding in keeping from crashing that little sucker as a came to a sudden, unforeseen and completely unanticipated stop!
I still crack up every time I think of this.
(...and btw, another thing I didn't come to appreciate about riding motorcycles over scooters until after I took this little spin on one of 'em, is that I REALLY like the idea that one uses the braking force of their engine to slow down and assist stopping on manual shift motorcycles, and whereas on scooters it's solely done by use of their brakes due to their automatic transmissions...and I didn't like the feel of that, I might say)
