So, Booga, what did you do for the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee celebrations? Well, I went to Germany of course!

The background to this road trip goes back a few months when Disco Dave asked me if I’d fancy a trip to a German scooter rally. The obvious answer was yes, so plans were made… Fast forward to June and I’m off to Crawley to cadge a lift off Disco Dave to Scooterdive #26 (with some sightseeing planned on the way).

We do the Harwich to The Hook of Holland ferry on the Thursday before the rally. In the evening we go to a German pub to meet up with some local and ex-pat scooterists, we have the pub to ourselves, and to say the evening takes a somewhat surreal turn is an understatement!
Friday morning and a bit of sightseeing before the rally. Then it’s off to Scooterdive…

The rally is being held in the town of Übach-Palenberg, just over the Dutch border, a pub houses the disco, with camping in a field behind. When you arrive the gate staff do a ‘TÜV test’ loosely based on the German equivalent of an MOT, it’s a witty dig at the notoriously difficult test (who says the Germans don’t have a sense of humour!?)

The rally itself is busy, with a mix of mostly very revvy P-ranges, a fair number of older large-frames, again revvy with big pipes, a lot of ‘Hot Hatch’ small frames and a surprising number of Lambrettas (yes you’ve guessed it, revvy with big pipes).
My German is frankly non-existent (I’m pretty sure I wished a local a happy death day by accident), but was made to feel very welcome, with many scooterists speaking excellent English, and helping me through the weekend with translations when needed.
Saturday daytime was spent lazing around whilst enjoying the local food and beer (of course), listening to the karaoke, which had, how can I put it, variable quality singing, which to be honest, made it all the more entertaining.
The evening was spent in the disco, mostly Northern Soul, with the dance floor full all night.
Sunday morning and it’s (free) breakfast time before we set off for dear old Blighty. I have to say I thoroughly enjoyed Scooterdive, well done to the organisers for putting on a great weekend.

Lastly congratulations to Simon Thissy Thistlewaite for getting a well-deserved furthest travelled award.
Oh, I almost forgot, FREE CAKE! British rallies should take a leaf out of the Scooterdive book and supply free cake!

Words and photos: Booga

Disco Dave has his say…

I will fill in the missing bits Booga left out, maybe because it makes him blush. As we were leaving Harwich he decided to become a typical tourist taking photos like no tomorrow, he was taking pictures of us leaving port and again when we arrived. As we headed down to meet up with Steve Evans and the rest of the Kulturbanhausen in his local pub, Booga was taking photos of balloons (hot Air), power stations and anything else he could point his camera at.

Friday was an early start as I wanted to see the Dragon’s Teeth around Aachen and visit something of military interest, passing a couple of large dams – one with a huge Lion monument, then on to the December 44 Museum dedicated to the battle of the Bulge. We arrived to a very impressive King Tiger tank (so we did our royal bit for the weekend).

Friday evening they had a few DJs playing various music. Saturday morning breakfast time was included with your entry fee, cold meats, cheese, bread rolls, roll mops, scrambled eggs with lardons and spinach, various drinks and fruit.

While Booga was having his afternoon nap one of the karaoke songs was like fairground music (popular in Germany). Listen here.
Booga forgets to tell you how we got our free cake, they had a policy to give free sweets with the rally logo on (made by a scooterist), cake and non-alcoholic drinks to the little man because he has been downtrodden all his life. To qualify you had to be small enough to fit under a specified arch, so I brought with me a ventriloquist puppet and this is how we got the goodies. They also had their own labelled bottles of plonk Facebook

The next ScooterDive rally will be Whitsun 2024.

Disco Dave

Want to see more photos? Flick through Booga’s rallery above