Gas is cheap and the drives are fun -- on a Vespa

So I sold my Porsche and bought a Vespa.

I didn't think it was a big deal. All I was doing was replacing $2,000 brake jobs, $268-a-month insurance, fading leather seats and any shred of "cool" I thought I had with a 2008 Vespa 250 GTSie. Now I roll on a scooter that gets nearly 70 miles per gallon and can hit 85 miles per hour, all while sitting on a suede leather seat hand-stitched in Modena, Italy.

A lot of people are changing their lifestyle because of high gas prices. I didn't do it to go "green" or save some polar bear for Al Gore to videotape on a piece of ice. I've got a Jeep Rubicon Unlimited sitting in the garage, which, by the way, has a little button you can push to display the terrible mileage you're getting. Nope, I did it because I thought it would be fun. And fun it is.

I bought the Vespa at the end of April and have put more than 2,000 miles on it. It's been great for work. I'm a commercial real estate mortgage broker, so my work-related driving consists of site inspections, meeting with borrowers and commuting to my office at Old Courthouse Square.

It was an adjustment not having access to my cell phone while I'm driving, but it's also given me time to think about some of the more complicated transactions I'm working on. My clients actually like the fact I'm cruising up on the Vespa.

I'm also president of the Santa Rosa Active 20-30 #50 Men's Club (you know, the guys that put on Battle of the Brews and take underprivileged kids back-to-school shopping for Kidspree.) Our club is made up of guys between the ages of 20 and 39, and any thoughts of sneaking in the fact their president was cruising around on a Vespa were eliminated the first time I rolled up to Stout Brothers Pub to howls of laughter and snapping of cell phone pictures. The biggest laughs, interestingly, were coming from my buddy who owns a huge pickup and pays more than $5 a gallon for diesel.

Prior to buying the Vespa for just under $7,000 in downtown Santa Rosa, I had committed to helping the Placerville club by serving tacos at their county fair. For kicks, I took that Friday off, fired up the scooter and rode up to Placerville! 150 miles each way. Down through the Napa Valley, onto I-80, through Sac-town and up to Placerville. Harley guys waved; sport bikers ignored me.

I was having a great day, taking mental notes on things I had learned by riding on the freeway: Ford Expeditions push a lot of wind away; I can smell what the driver in front of me is smoking and I can feel the wiper fluid from his car; and never follow a horse trailer because it's probably not washer fluid spraying out the back. Lesson learned.

When I'm stopped at a light, I usually hear, "Hey, what kind of mileage does that thing get?" It takes me about $8 and two minutes to fill up the tank, which will cover about 170 miles. To put things in perspective, filling up the Porsche costs about $60 and in my Jeep the pump stops pumping at $75.

The cost of gas is now a non-issue when making plans. In fact, I've figured that every 1,000 miles I ride, I save about $325 in gas alone versus the Porsche. So, at 2,000 miles, I've saved more than $600, enough to sponsor four kids at Kidspree.

I was lucky enough to grow up in Japan, live in Nebraska, and travel to Italy, Spain and Costa Rica. But it wasn't until I started cruising around Sonoma and Napa valleys that I really started to appreciate how lucky we are to live here. On the weekends, my girlfriend and I have headed out to the Union Hotel for lunch and have cruised to Napa Valley over Trinity Road. We've gone wine tasting with friends at Dry Creek Valley and had lunch in St. Helena. Evening rides to Music on the Green in Healdsburg or dinner in Sebastopol bring a whole new meaning to "take the long way home."

So, I sold my Porsche and bought a Vespa. Life is good.