If you’ve never ridden a Segway before then you don’t know what you’re missing as it’s just the best fun and a great family activity to do in the UK and abroad. When you have a teenage boy it’s sometimes hard to impress them, and even harder to find something that you can do with them as they’re generally chained to their XBox or Playstation. So to find something which everyone loves, that you can do all around the world is a major bonus!
Doing a Segway tour is a great way to see a city, or ride around a forest,
What is a Segway
A Segway is a brand of “self-balancing personal transportation devices”. The most common type of Segway is a two-wheeled, electric-powered vehicle that uses gyroscopic sensors and accelerometers to maintain balance and stability. These devices are controlled by shifting your body weight, leaning forward to move forward and leaning backward to slow down or reverse.
Over time, the Segway brand has introduced different models and variations, including those designed for specific purposes like tourism, law enforcement, and industrial use. Despite not becoming a mainstream mode of transportation, Segways and similar self-balancing devices remain in use in various niches and applications around the world.
They are super easy to learn how to ride and a really fun way of exploring a forest or city.
Where can you ride a Segway in the UK?
In the UK, most Go Ape centres offer Forest Segway tours. This is how we first started riding Segways, at their Bracknell centre. Since then we’ve visited the Go Ape at Tilgate Woods (near Crawley) and Moors Valley (near Ringwood).
What happens is that the guide gives you a short lesson in how to ride a Segway, with recorded training letting you know about all the safety measures you must take. It’s not a high risk, white knuckle activity but like anything you need to take care to keep everyone safe.
Next you’ll be guided onto the Segway itself, with the trainer explaining where to stand and how to get on and off. Then you can have a go, usually around a little training area to get used to leaning forward to make it go faster and steering left and right. Your machine will be in training mode which means its speed is limited while you’re getting used to it.
Then you’ll be off, following the guide through the forest, and at some point he will take it out of training mode so that you can go a bit faster, up to its top speed of around 14mph.
The Forest Segways at Go Ape go around a variety of terrains, along paths used by walkers and cyclists and also off-road through the trails.
You get around an hour in total, riding along various routes through the forest.
Las Vegas Downtown Segway tour
PLEASE NOTE : THERE ARE NO LAS VEGAS SEGWAY TOURS ANY MORE
The most exciting place we’ve done a Segway tour is in downtown Las Vegas. We started at the Downtown Container Park and then rode around the streets, which are actually really quiet, mainly sticking to the pavements (sidewalks). You visit a memorial to the 58 victims of the Mandalay Bay shooting incident, see some great street art, and also visit the pawn shop from the Pawn Stars TV show.
I would highly recommend the Downtown Segway tour as the guides are really patient when teaching you how to ride, and knowledgeable about the local area. You get to see so many landmarks and learn about how Downtown has developed over the years.
San Diego Segway Tour
We booked with Adventures In San Diego and our guide, Brigitte, was brilliant! We did the Balboa Park Tour and it was just the three of us with her, so we didn’t need much training and could get out and about really quickly. Balboa is home to a spectacular array of flowers, plants, trees and bushes, plus lots of museums, art trails, sporty areas and more. It’s a huge area so the Segway is the perfect way to explore. Brigitte was happy to stop and take photos of us, and was really knowledgeable about the city’s history. You need to be at least 15 years old to take a Segway tour and Adventures In San Diego offer so many different ones (I actually found it quite hard to choose!)
Rome Segway Tour
I went to Rome in October and (of course) booked a Segway Tour! It was with my older son who’d never ridden one before but he was soon into the swing of it. Our guide was brilliant and it was a great way of covering a lot of ground in a relatively short amount of time.
We visited the Parthenon, Colosseum and much more, learning about the history of the city which was fascinating.
Salzburg Segway Tour
We visited Austria this year and had a brilliant time on the Salzburg Segway tour. It really was the perfect way to get around this mountainous city, and our guide showed us new ways of riding one which was really helpful for the steep hills.
Munich Segway Tour
In Munich there are a few Segway tour providers and some will just rent a Segway without a tour, which is so cool! We used Segway Tour Munich and our guide took us to various sights, including the surfers at the Englisch Garden, one of the highlights of our visit to the city.
How to book a Segway tour
If you’re in the UK then check out the Go Ape website for places where they offer the Forest Segway activity. Although there’s no age limit, there’s a size limit where you need to weigh between 7 stone and 18 stone.
If you’re based elsewhere around the world it’s worth checking GetYourGuide for Segway tours. They operate them in places such as
- Valencia
- Krakow
- Tirol
- Seville
- Berlin
- Rome
- Miami
- …and many more!