Getting a Scooter in Portugal

Early on, when I first moved to Portugal, I wrote a blog post titled, “It’s All Uphill.” Two years in, there are still uphill days and weeks.

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One of my “uphills” is transportation. I had been getting around fairly well using Ubers and, when Ubers got scarce, the local buses. In the summer, when there are lots of tourists, there are more buses. In the winter, the schedule is cut back: On weekends, there are no buses running from my village into Tavira (the next big town), and there are a couple of gaps during the week days when the buses don’t run.

I chose to live in a small village. I could move into Tavira and be within walking distance (or easily found taxi) to just about anywhere. But I like where I live. So, I have put up with the inconvenience of not always having transport and I have enjoyed most of my longish walks from Tavira to home.

I like the idea of not having a car. When I lived in Florida, the car sat for about half the week, every week. But things are spread out in Florida, even in small towns, and getting your groceries home required a car or at least transport of some sort. Walking in southwest Florida is done in the early morning nine months out of the year. But here, even in summer, you can walk almost all the time without being too hot or too cold. (August gets a wee bit too hot for midday walks, but I have done it.)  I can walk to the village store and get almost everything I need. And the little stores here don’t jack up prices the way the corner groceries and “quick-rip” gas station stores do in the States.

But I need some sort of transportation beyond the local buses.

Portuguese Driver’s License?

I am in driver’s license exchange limbo right now and have been for almost a year. I applied to exchange my license, put in all the paperwork, and went to an in-person appointment where I turned in my Florida driver’s license, had my picture taken for my new Portuguese license and was told that it would arrive in the mail within 30 days.

In between my paperwork being accepted and the actual license being mailed, the requirements changed. IMT (Portugal’s DMV) would no longer accept a form from the consulate; you needed to have your driving record apostilled (it’s like having it notarized, but it’s for public documents). So, I went back through the process of requesting my Florida driver’s record (using a mail-in form and paying a nominal fee) and having it mailed to a friend’s Florida address. She then kindly mailed the record with the required form, fees, and return envelope to the special office in Tallahassee that gives the official apostille stamp. This process took a bit over a month. She scanned the forms, front and back, and emailed them to me.  I, in turn, emailed the forms to the IMT. Later on, she sent me the actual documents via DHL ($75) along with other important mail. (Anything important needs to be sent by DHL. Mail is catch as catch can and packages are damn near impossible to get through.)

From there, I wait. You need to have a lot of patience dealing with bureaucracies, no matter what country you are in. In Portugal, the culture is that you don’t hear back from someone until they have an answer for you. With the new changes, the IMT is backed up and most likely, the changes were made before the infrastructure (software, forms, etc.) was in place to handle the change. It’s not uncommon to wait a year for your permanent license here. A few months ago, my temporary license expired and I went back to the IMT, hoping to get some movement. I got a stamp that extended my temporary license for another six months. The agent flipped her computer screen around so I could read the English translation of my situation: “Exchanging a driver’s license can be a long process.” I laughed. She laughed. It’s all good.

Is Getting a Scooter a Solution?

In the meantime, I am going to school two nights a week and the last bus back to the village leaves about an hour before school lets out. The latest bus I can take to get myself to school on time drops me off two hours early. I don’t mind the thirty-minute walk home but there’s a lot of wasted time. When I added in the lack of transportation on weekends, I started to get antsy.

A scooter seems like a low-cost way to get around. There are tons of people on scooters here. Old people, young people. I started my quest for a scooter by attempting to rent one. It was a very short rental period that did not end well for me or the scooter. Even though damage was minimal on both sides, it was a bit traumatizing. I was a little scraped and banged up. The scooter lost a mirror. I lost my security deposit. And a chunk of self-confidence. I told friends I would write about it when I could make a funny story out of it, but what can I tell you? I was not ready for a scooter.

But… I was not to be defeated, either. One day, I looked down from my balcony during my morning coffee and saw a person on a scooter with a big L on their safety vest followed by another scooter. There was a driving school nearby that taught you how to ride a scooter! I had no idea how to find it, but I stumbled across an office one day and inquired about scooter lessons. I was told to go to a different office, just a few blocks away.

I took a couple of lessons for about €25 each. That is a LOT less than a security deposit. I had a helmet with a headset built in so my instructor could tell me what to do. The first lesson was in an area with little to no traffic. The second lesson got me out into traffic with the instructor following me on a separate scooter. We did roundabouts and went from Tavira to my village and back. He pronounced me “fit to ride.” He wasn’t wrong, but he was being generous.

Some of the Buying Ins and Outs

You don’t need a special/separate motorcycle license to drive a scooter up to 125ccs in Portugal. (You do need at least the minimum A1 Portuguese license.) I started looking locally for a used scooter, but quickly realized that I would need to figure out registration and bill of sale transfer and insurance. My Portuguese is improving, but it is nowhere near what I would need to handle this type of stuff. I went to the local Honda dealership, hoping they might have used scooters for sale. No such luck. In fact, they didn’t even have new scooters or motorcycles in stock. They received about 12 vehicles a month and had a backlog of over 200 orders. This also created a supply and demand issue: prices were marked up an additional 25% or more. Ouch.

On top of deciding on how big the scooter should be, I was also faced with the decision on whether to get gas or electric. Electric scooters are less expensive, but have limited range. Gas stations are plentiful and easy to find. More than that, I assumed electric was out of the running because I live in an apartment on what is called the first floor here, but is actually the second floor in the US. I had no place to charge an electric scooter.

About a month ago, I was walking with a friend on one of the back streets of the village and we saw an electric scooter plugged into an extension cord. The same type of extension cord I use in my apartment. It suddenly dawned on me that I didn’t need a special charging facility. I just needed a long extension cord. I widened my search to cover electric scooters and found a dealership in Faro.

We went, I saw, I fell in love. In a responsible manner. I picked out an electric 50cc scooter with a removable battery so I could charge it in my apartment. It cost less than half the price of the Honda. I may receive a 25% rebate (it’s in limbo, but chances are good). It has a two year warranty and, because it is small and electric, doesn’t need to be registered. I am still working on getting insurance for it. That may be another hurdle, but it will get done.

Legally, I don’t need a helmet but I’m not an idiot. I know my limitations and I also realize I’m on a very small scooter sharing the road with cars, many driven by tourists who are not paying attention. I chose a VERY COOL helmet (black and hot pink) and a chain lock, but I am thinking hard about getting a cool alarm that connects to the wheel.

The scooter was delivered last week. There was a to-do over using my credit card.  (Apparently you need a pin for some credit cards here. Since I try very hard not to use my credit card, I hadn’t run into this and had no idea what the pin was. It took me all of two minutes to get a new pin online…)

I took the scooter out for a short ride in my village because there is very little traffic. Yesterday, I did a longer ride to the big grocery store to get my cream and some eggs.

I won’t lie. I am, at this point, not comfortable with riding. But I felt pretty good when I brought the scooter back to my apartment and I was in one piece.

So, you know me… disaster awaits.

I tried to get the scooter into the lobby of my building, which involves going up a step. You put the front wheel up on the step and goose the throttle a touch to get the heavier back of the scooter up. I had done this fairly smoothly the other day. Sunday, when I tried it, I lost control of the scooter, and ended up smashing me and the scooter into the wall. Fortunately, nothing broke. On me or the bike or the building. Not even a one of the dozen eggs I had bought. But my shoulder is mushed up which makes doing anything more than typing painful. I have two boo-boos, one on each knee. I have a lovely black and blue on my tummy and something is hurting on my left side. Actually, most of my upper left side hurts. (I’m left-handed so of COURSE I always injure my left side.)

The “bicycle boys” who stop at the bakery every week helped me get the scooter in. They were very sweet because let’s face it, they understand wipe outs. I am sore and shaken up a bit and embarrassed and I want to cry. It would be easy to give up. It would be easy to say I am too old for this. But the truth is I see people much older than I am riding around on scooters so, no, I am not too old for this. I am just not good at this yet.

As adults, we tend to do things that are in our comfort zone because we’ve already figured out so many of the pieces of life. And that’s why learning something new is uncomfortable. (Yeah, literally. Ha Ha.) We don’t want to be new and stupid at something. We don’t like to look foolish. We want to be good at new things immediately, use those transferrable skills.

I am not good at this. Tomorrow I will get on my scooter and ride it to school (if my left arm is functioning well enough). I will probably screw up again. Hopefully, I will not screw up so badly that I maim or kill myself. I need to take things slowly and allow myself to be not good at something and therefore take more care with what I do when I am on the scooter. And learning new things in general.  

As with most things in my new life, getting comfortable with the scooter will be a learning process. It will take time. There is no instant gratification with this; no natural ability. I just have to keep trying. And I will. Right after I ice my shoulder…