Travelling Fletchers

After a few heavy days of history we wanted to lighten the mood – so we planned a segway tour of the city.

First though – a few checks.

There’s a minimum weight limit for segways – otherwise I guess they’d never move. David, Cam and I had been on one before. Charlie hadn’t. We looked up the ride requirements and wondered if she’d meet them. Having a healthy child and no cause to weigh her, I had no idea.

We also don’t have any scales in the apartment (that would be weird).

So I did the next best thing – messaged the mum of her best friend to ask if she knew her daughter’s weight. They’re close in size – so we thought that might give us a clue.

The mum didn’t know either – but she did have a set of scales and her daughter at home. She kindly obliged and weighed her on the spot. The verdict – yes, it was possible Charlie could ride. She should be over the minimum weight limit… even if only by a small margin.

We turned up for our booked segway session only to be told it had actually been cancelled! BUT… the good news was we’d been upgraded free of charge to the two-hour tour. Twice the time for the same price.

We had a tour of Berlin on a segway – a whole wobble of us gliding through the city.

It started with a practice ride. Naturally, the other three took to it like ducks to water. Me? I just kept going round and round in circles – clockwise, too – and couldn’t work out how to reverse it.

Whilst we were waiting, I took my day bag off. This gave me a little more stability – and a centre of gravity I actually knew the location of. It sounds so simple, but it worked. I could at least go forwards, backwards, left and right – just needed to work out how to stop.

Then it was time to go. Off we went – like ducklings following a mother duck. Although in this case, the mother duck was sitting astride a moped… with 12 wobbly segways trailing behind.

We zipped past Berlin landmarks – the Brandenburg Gate, the Reichstag, and stretches of the Berlin Wall still standing. We learned snippets of history mixed with local fun facts – we saw where the wall had once stood and followed the line of cobbled stones that lead the way, quietly reminding everyone that the city was once divided.

There were cobbled streets, tram tracks to weave between, and then traffic coming from the opposite direction just to keep us on our toes.

We only had four falls in the group – and three of them were David. We could almost start charging admission.

By the end, even I was weaving between the group with something close to confidence. Two hours had flown by – and so had we.