I flunked Segway
Hi, everybody!
Herewith an embarrassing report on my brief flirtation with Adventure. Extremely brief, as it turned out.
We’ve both been so bound up lately in projects, either finishing them or finding creative strategies to avoid them, that we were two quarts low on fun. Then in Friday’s Weekend Guide I saw an ad for Segway Tours, an hour and a half along the Katy Trail for bikers, walkers, joggers, and Segwayers. What an adventure that would be! Sightseeing as you glide on a Segway at a cool 12 MPH. Probably the last hurrah of fabulous Indian summer, 78 degrees, cloudless, mild breeze. Perfect.
What’s a Segway besides a cute spelling of segue, defined as a smooth, uninterrupted transition from one thing to another? Alas, for me the segue from solid ground to this space-age vehicle was neither smooth nor uninterrupted.
The Segway is a two-wheeled personal transporter—their copywriting, not mine. It has two big wheels with footpads in between, and an upright pole with handlebars. In a housing underneath there are five gyroscopes that make it work and stand it upright. In three years and over a thousand tours, they’ve had only four people fall off. I’d have felt a lot more comfortable if they’d said NO ONE had ever fallen off.
Our guide explained that you simply pull a handlebar left or right to make it go that way. OK, I thought, like reins on a horse; so far, so good. Oh, and you must always stand erect with slightly bent legs and elbows at your sides. You shift weight forward or backward to make it accelerate or slow/stop, but never bend your body in any direction. “You’ll get the hang of it in a few minutes. Let’s practice now.”
He steadied the Segway as I stepped aboard and immediately panicked. It felt like trying to balance yourself on a board atop a large ball. My balance can be kind of dodgy on flat ground, and this felt scary as hell to me. I said, “I can’t do this,” and stepped back off while he again steadied the device.
Frankly, I’d expected a smaller version of a golf cart. Ah, but they have FOUR wheels. Big difference.
Everybody else looked so cool, skimming around like they had personal hovercrafts. I envied them till I thought it through. An hour and a half of standing erect with slightly bent knees? I don’t think so.
[I had a flashback on learning to drive a car with a stick shift, saying in my head, "EASE out on the clutch, EASE down on the accelerator, use the hood ornament like a gunsight." Of course, eventually it became motor memory, so to speak. But that car had FOUR WHEELS.]
Robert was gliding around like a veteran, a big grin on his face under that helmet-over-gimme-cap. He was in heaven. He would have bailed with me out of gallantry, but when I said our fees at that point were non-returnable, he acquiesced to my leaving. I assured him I’d be fine on my own till he got back, and I high-tailed it back to the hotel lobby where the Segway Tours sign-up desk is. I had a lovely 90 minutes just hanging out, watching on TV the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile horse race at Santa Anita. The winning horse, by the way, is owned by Shaikh Mohammad Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice-President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai. The rich get rich and the poor get children.
When Robert got back he said I was smart to bail. Everybody had achy backs and legs. He’s sweet that way. So we went out to dinner and had a margarita, then picked up Buddy from Happy Tails and went home.
That’s actually a happy ending. My main adventure is loving and laughing with my guys. And some day I’ll have my own version of a Segway—one of those motorized scooters like Bette Midler rides as Delores Delgado, the Toast of Chicago. Haven’t seen that video? It’s on YouTube and it’s a hoot.
Cheers!
Roz
