Paris
ONE OF MY MAJOR CONCERNS in traveling is looking like a tourist, which means overseas I’m in a constant state of fear. I am 6 feet 3 with curly, light-brown hair. I had a really tough time blending into Cambodia. In Tunisia, no one confused me with a Bedouin nomad.
Of course, there are some obvious things we all can do. Leave the New York Yankees cap at home. Don’t wear those absurd fanny packs that read to pickpockets, “MONEY. PASSPORT. HERE.” And don’t wear T-shirts telling everyone where you last wore said fanny pack.
So what was I doing in Paris, target of a thousand American Express buses and even more Yankees hats, roaming the streets on a weird motor scooter that made me 7 feet tall and as conspicuous as a giraffe grazing on the Champs-Elysees?
Saving me from a humiliation normally reserved for public nudity were seven other tourists with their own scooters, own helmets and own levels of shame. We were cruising single file onto Place de la Concorde, following a lanky American guide like a family of wobbly ducklings.
About 212 years earlier on this square, King Louis XVI had his head lopped off along with 1,343 bourgeois French deemed too rich by the starving proletariat. When I first hopped on my little transporter, I quietly hoped that guillotine would still be in place. My neck would fit comfortably – and willingly – into any device that would end my adventure in tourist humiliation.
As it turned out, the smile wasn’t in my throat. It was on my face. I have since become a reluctant convert to the rapidly growing world of Segways.
For those who still think the best mode for touring cities is in comfortable shoes, Segways are battery-operated, big-wheel scooters that can start and stop with a bend of the waist and turn with a flick of the wrist. They are the invention of Dean Kamen, a New Hampshire man who set out to invent a wheelchair that would go up stairs. In the process, he also developed a way for able-bodied people to expend the same energy going up the Champs-Elysees.
The Segway was born in 2001 and commercialized in 2002, and by 2003 they had hit the streets of Paris under the ownership of a 29-year-old Texas A&M grad named Dave Mebane.
Today, Segway tours have spread to five other cities, with more to come. Don’t be surprised to see a troupe like us one day cruising the 16th Street Mall. Go ahead and laugh. Ill guarantee they’ll have heard it before. We had.
And as you’re reading this, I probably look pretty good in the photo album of that Japanese tourist.
A couple of firsts
It all started on a pleasant summer morning when we gathered at the south leg of the Eiffel Tower. For an idea of my afflictionaversion to tourist traps, in four previous trips to Paris I had never been to the Eiffel Tower. Moi? I was too busy trying to blend, acting terribly French, with a cafe au lait in an outdoor cafe in the Latin Quarter.
Besides, there are approximately five street corners in Paris where the Eiffel Tower is not visible. Paris’ landscape and skyline are as flat as last week’s Le Monde, and the Eiffel Tower appears everywhere, like a mother who won’t leave you alone.
Greeting us was Mike Ivey, 23, freshly graduated from Texas A&M (notice a trend?). Tall, lanky and clean-cut, he stood atop his Segway, which looks more like a giant, toothless push mower than any of the sexy scooters darting around Paris.
A small platform for your feet rides above two big wheels. Stretching up from the platform comes a metal panel that turns into handlebars with a green monitor screen in the middle. Two arrows sit on the left handle.
He told us to follow him to the office on foot to get our Segways. I noticed his unit started, turned, slowed and stopped with no discernible movement by Ivey. It seemed part of him. I didn’t know if it ran by batteries or telepathy.
As he rode and we walked, a French motorist leaned out of his parked car and yelled at Ivey, in accented English, “Can I change my car for your bicycle? My car is very expensive.”
Ivey barely turned. “We get that a lot,” he said, his nose pointing up over a wry smile. “You feel like a celebrity on these things.”
When we began our training, I felt more like a celebrity wearing a Hawaiian shirt and beer-can hat. I suddenly wanted to disappear. It was too late. In a quiet, concrete courtyard adjacent to the office, Ivey explained the magic of Segway.
The handlebars lay limp against him like a bike off its kickstand. Then he pressed a black key to the monitor, pushed a button, and the handlebars suddenly came to life. They were up on their own, thanks to the gyroscope, the same principle Kamen used to get wheelchairs up steps.
“The Segway has two emotions,” Ivey said. “Angry and happy. Make sure you have a green smiley face on your monitor.”
A green smiley face means the Segway is on and ready. If it’s frowning, it means it’s off. I looked at mine. I asked Ivey what it means if the face is laughing at you.
The principles of operating a Segway, thankfully, are laughingly simple. To move forward, you merely lean forward on your toes. To slow down, lower your derriere, as if into an imaginary chair. To move backward, simply lean back on your heels. Changing direction requires only a turn of the left handle up for left or down for right.
The Segways have a turning radius of a house cat. We each took turns getting on one. I pressed the black key, stepped up on the platform, and the Segway started to make this awful gurgling sound like a flooded outboard motor. I looked at the monitor. Tony Soprano was pointing his index finger at me.
“Make sure you see the smiley face before getting on,” Ivey scolded.
Once all of our Segways wereall, well, happy, we experimented. As he said, I bent over a bit and moved forward at 5 mph. I wanted to slow down. I dropped my rear end. I started heading for a concrete wall. I bailed out as if hit by a sniper.
The eight of us lined up for a test drive. It was a diverse group: a mother and two daughters from Ontario, a father from California, his 12-year-old son and 13-year-old friend, a 33-year-
old Russian woman and one suddenly cocky travel writer.
In single file, we made it up a small embankment with minimal casualties. The Russian went at an angle and landed on her bluejeaned butt. “I’m bloody, but fine,” she said.
She had better be. It was time to hit the mean streets of Paris.
No enigmatic smiles
Paris is a city of 2 million people and averages about 2.3 million tourists in July. For the next five hours, I truly believe all 4.3 million gawked at me. It’s an odd juxtaposition being the center of attention in the center of some of the world’s grandest monuments. Suddenly, I became Mr. Mona Lisa.
We left the office compound and snaked our way past a bustling sidewalk cafe on a quiet side street. As the Russian rammed into a parked Renault, I couldn’t help noticing a dozen diners staring back at me, a croissant or coffee cup halfway to their agape mouths.
We passed without comment and went east from the Eiffel Tower, stopping in the green expanse that is the Esplanade des Invalides. The esplanade leads to the hotel that once held 4,000 disabled war veterans in the 17th century and now is adjacent to the army museum and the church holding Napoleon Bonaparte’s arrogant tomb.
This wasn’t just a loosely guided scooter ride. Ivey was a fountain of information, most of it trivial, which gave the tour a wonderful offbeat edge. For example, did you know Napoleon’s tomb is in the bowels of the church, so people who want to see him must bend over a railing from the floor above and thus bow to him for eternity?
Halfway through his spiel, a stylish Parisian woman sashayed by just as Ivey described the tomb’s 12-carat gold plating.
“What are you doing?” she asked. “What is this?”
“They’re Segways,” he said, automatically reaching into his bag for a glossy brochure. “Here. Try it sometime.”
She walked away, giving an approving nod and a thumb’s up.
We went north toward the Seine River, where the traffic resembled the 24 Hours of Le Mans. Cars sped past without even a curious glance, which was not reassuring as we approached the Pont de la Concorde bridge.
We crossed the river and, after the Russian nearly clocked a dog, stopped at the Place de la Concorde along with one of those double-decker tourist buses. As their tour guide described how King Louis XVI lost his head here, the dozens of tourists turned away and took pictures of us instead.
Ivey added his own little footnote to Louis’ beheading. The night before, the executioners took the 70-pound blade and used a giant rock to dull it to the sharpness of a shovel. It took seven drops of the blade to cut off his head.
“He was conscious for the first four of them,” Ivey said. “It was not a good day to be Louis XVI.”
We rolled east to the adjacent and majestic Jardin des Tuileries. By now, most of us on our Segways were as confident as Evel Knievel. I was doing hairpin turns around cars. “I’m an expert on these things!” one of the little boys boasted as the Russian was being fished out of the Seine.
We passed by the Louvre, where Ivey told us that if you spent a minute in front of all 300,000 pieces of art, for 24 hours a day, seven days a week, it would take 206 days to tour the entire museum. We could have. Our legs were that fresh. By the time we returned to the office midafternoon, we had ridden the equivalent of about 15 miles.
In the simple office adorned with a giant maroon Texas A&M banner, Mebane sat on a couch and told me how this whole thing started. He was spending his summers in Normandy working for the accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers, bored out of his mind.
When American friends visited, he had them rent bikes to see the area. Boom! He quit PWC and opened Fat Tire Bike Tours in Paris in 1998. Kamen began renting out Segways by 2003, the year after they were commercialized. He has expanded to Vienna, Budapest, Chicago, New Orleans, Washington, D.C., and Atlanta, with more set for places such as San Francisco.
Being a cynic, I asked if the “several thousands” of Americans who rent Segways from him do it because they’re too lazy to walk, as one snide Parisian yelled to him once.
“No,” Mebane said. “They like it because a Segway is too expensive to purchase for the average Joe. With all the bells and whistles, they’re about $5,000. So here you get to ride the Segway for the usual battery life, which is five hours. And you can see Paris at the same time.”
And you can see it twice. After I left the office, I did something I never thought I could do after touring 15 miles of Paris. I climbed the Eiffel Tower.
Staff writer John Henderson can be reached at 303-820-1299 or jhenderson@denverpost.com.
The details
Paris-based City Segway Tours offers Segway tours day or night for $65 to $95 per person in Paris, Vienna, Budapest, Atlanta, Chicago, and Washington, D.C. Reservations are recommended, and the company also offers group and corporate expeditions for up to 25 people. You can watch a video of a Segway tour on their website at city segwaytours.com, or call for more information at 33-1-56-58-10-54.