Sunday Adventure

Last Sunday, I went on a Segway tour of Forest Park.

I am a natural Segwayer. I found the secret, early on, which is to steer with your pelvis. Segway forward? Pelvic thrust forward! Segway reverse? Pelvic counter-thrust.  Warp-speed  forward? Stand casually on the device in the backwards-S posture I naturally adopt. I kept trying to twitch my hips left and right to steer but they devised it so you use a handlebar.

It felt so right. I was one with the Segway.

Gary was not one with the Segway.

He looked like a concerned chipmunk with his rear clenched and his head staring down at his little pair of hands white-knuckling the handlebar. The staff of Glide Saint Louis was very helpful, even when Gary couldn’t make it up three out of four hills.

(The next morning at work I jumped into the middle of an unspoken conversation and greeted Friend #3 with a sigh and said, “Really. Who can’t ride a Segway?”

“Who’s having trouble writing a segue?” she asked.

“Gary! We rode Segways Sunday.”

And, unfortunately, she caught on then, because that could have made a really funny conversation. (“His butt got all clenched, that’s why he couldn’t write a segue.”))

Appropriately, I have no segue. Here we are on the right:’

I’m hiding behind the rhino horn.

And let me applaud the people at Glide Saint Louis, they provide a great tour. There truly were parts of Forest Park I saw that I didn’t know existed. There’s a darling wooden bridge by Steinberg Rink, for example. And not only were the Glide tour guides knowledgeable, they were concerned that we inadvertently over-tipped them and called to alert us afterward. (The twenty tucked into a pile of ones made them suspicious.) This gave Gary a chance to be Lord Bountiful, which he loves, so everything worked out well for him.