Action Segway Tours: Don’t Forget Your Gloves and Longjohns!
With the sun shining and the temps hovering in the low 50s, we joined Action Segway Tours for a chance to tour the town on their most elegant two-wheeled vehicles, offering speeds up to 14 mph and an easy 360 turning radius. Joining us were four young adults dressed in what might be described as fall attire.
Jack and I, however, wore the trappings of any seasoned and old New Englander: hats under our helmets, scarves, thick gloves and a few layers of jacket. But thinking that I couldn’t possibly need my silk long underwear in Southern California, I left those back at the condo. Then we proceeded to freeze every part of our bodies off as we navigated streets, sidewalks, vacant alleys and Bald Eagle habit in and around Big Bear Lake.
Action’s Segway Tours are a new offering, for the 90-minute jaunt with a guide the cost was $85 per person. A video demo, helmet and plenty of instruction began the outing. It didn’t take long for us to get the hang of it, yet in about ten minutes we had our first girl down. The Segway splayed on the ground, it’s proud handlebars touching the ground, yet the red-haired twenty-something popped right back up. All good! I kept looking back at the youngsters and feeling sorry that they hadn’t worn gloves, big coats or even in one case, long pants. Shiver me timbers as some pirate once said!
The $7500 gyroscope-balanced Segways come equipped with five-inch off road tires, and when you get going too fast down a hill, they automatically slow down. The hard part is that you have a feeling like if you lean back, you’ll flop backward, yet the effect of doing that is simply that it slows you to a stop. As we navigated a street next to a school with cars on either side, we looked back and wham, another two Segways were down on the asphalt and another woman was flat on her back. But she got up and was fine and the cold wind chilled journey commenced with no further incidents. Action Segway Tours, 40754 Village Dr Big Bear Lake, 909-366-0891.