By the way I recently purchased the usscootermuseum domain name and am working to restore John's website.

This is great. I dropped by that site regularly and submitted various things over the years that always ended up getting posted on the site. I was sad to see it disappear and am excited to learn of your plans to restore it.

I have used wayback machine to see bits and pieces of it, but let us know when its all back up and running.

Well, I didn't end up going to Portland. It ended up just being too much of a detour from the trip route and timeline that I needed to be on with the family for us to get out to Portland. I'll get back there at some point!

Sounds like it went about like usual - good event for those able to come early and hugely disappointing for those that couldn't get there until late into the "official" dates. I noticed quite a few comments on the VMBC Facebook page about the place being a ghost town particularly on Saturday and Sunday.

My take is that so long as the fairgrounds allow VMBC attendees in to camp/setup far, far in advance of the actual meet dates, the club will never be able to control the dates and will ALWAYS have a problem with those that show up a week early and then pull out of Portland on the Friday or early Saturday or the actual meet dates - some even earlier than that. Not worth getting upset about since neither side seems interested in making changes, just something to keep in mind when planning for Portland.

Yes, I think those parts are overpriced as well, but nothing to worry about. The free market will work its magic and the one of three things will happen: they'll never sell at those prices, or the seller will lower the prices until they do sell, or a willing buyer will come along and pay those prices. I do not think any educated buyer should pay those prices, but it's not impossible that someone, somewhere might do it...certainly not me, however.

I don't think this will make any lasting difference to the restoration hobby in any meaningful way, to tell you the truth. I suspect the parts will languish on eBay for a long time. Anyone that is really into Simplex will do their homework, I imagine, and source their parts here, from fellow enthusiasts, or from Wayne before they'll pull the trigger on eBay parts with high prices.

But, at the end of the day all it takes is one guy that says "I gotta have that!" in order for the seller to realize those kind of prices.

I very carefully follow eBay for scooter & motorbike stuff (though I'm not buying Simplex stuff, so no competition for you guys) and I'm amazed at the prices some stuff I'd call scrap or junk actually sells for especially unusable frames, forks and wheels. There have been plenty of high list prices on nice items also that never sell, too. There is one particular Doodle Bug related piece I'd like to own (but don't "need") that the seller has priced far over market value (almost 3x). It has been relisted for 8 years for the exact same price with only a buy-it-now option. The seller won't entertain and offer of one cent less. Everyone that might have been interested in buying it saw it for sale years ago and decided the price was too high, but the seller keeps trying. That may be the fate of these Simplex parts.

On the bright side, at least they are for sale and not in a scrap yard headed for a crusher or on a container ship headed to an overseas steel mill.

The website seems to be back up. I've been able to access it over the last few days. It is in very, very serious need of editing and updating and the forum there is still essentially dead, but at least they have something out there. Evidently there are 800+ members on the club's Facebook site. I still don't understand why the club can't or won't get its internet presence together but my hope at this point is that they are working on it and that they try to redirect those 800+ people over to a solid club website (hopefully with a GOOD forum function). I am not a fan of using Facebook as a stand-in for a good club website, but that seems to be about what it's come to. Hopefully it doesn't continue that way forever.

I did not make it this year. Really wanted to and at one point I was fairly confident that the stars were going to align and I actually would, but 2017 was once again not the year. I'm going to work towards getting there for 2018 if at all possible.

I have enjoyed following along here and checking out the photos that have been posted, so thanks for that!

Site still doesn't work and there are no signs it will be back anytime soon.

Darren is stepping down as President of the VMBC and has apparently not identified a successor, at least according to the last couple of magazines. So, I highly doubt that he or anyone else in the VMBC is working on the site at all. Darren was, as far as I can tell, about the only VMBC leadership interested in doing anything online but he seems perfectly happy with the club's Facebook site.

There is some traffic on that site but I'm not a Facebooker (for many reasons) so I don't participate there. At least they have the meet dates listed there, I suppose.

As I said before it is so disappointing that the club wasted all the time and money on a new website only to let it die. This site has done more to promote the VMBC online than anything they've done!

But I'm still a member...20 years this year. 

Although I'm not as active here as a poster as most others, I too, appreciate that this site exists and is well managed so that people like me can drop in and talk about motorbikes and scooters. That's pretty darn cool.