My First Segway Ride... Almost

It was Friday afternoon, and I was heading back to the office after a client meeting, when I glimpsed signs promoting Segway trial rides in a parking lot of a local shopping mall. Excited by the chance to see a Segway up close and maybe even have a go on one, I hung a left into the mall lot, and spent several minutes working my way back to the parking lot where I saw the signs.

It was much more of a hassle than I'd thought to find the Segway demo lot, as I had to wind my way around medians and across busy mall road intersections. Finally, I got close enough to see one of the promo signs, which read:

Segway Rides

$10 for 10 minutes

Oh man, forget that! I mean, if you want me to try a $5,000 Segway out and potentially buy one, I'm certainly not going to pay $10 just to try it for 10 minutes! I decided to pass up the opportunity, but not before getting close enough to see nobody out riding Segways except the demo staff.

I was even put off from stopping for a closer look because I figured the sales staff, desperate for a rider would probably try their darndest to rope me into riding one and I didn't have $10 burning a hole in my pocket. Besides, I couldn't afford to mess around too long, as I had plenty of work to do back at the office.

So, my opportunity to ride a Segway has come and gone for now. Hopefully I'll come across another chance to ride one of these things for no charge one day.

Maybe I'll reconsider at least having a closer look on the weekend, assuming the Segway folks are still offering demo rides. While I would like to ride one, even seeing one up close would be quite interesting. We'll see...

On a related note, if you have any interest in reading historical and up to date articles on the Segway, my friend Lorenz Szabo has compiled a collection of Segway articles from the web, into a nicely formatted Palm Reader document (203k). I must say it's really nice to have all these documents compiled about Segway, since it provides a longer term view of its history in one place. (thanks Lo!)