Well, I had my first Segway ride today, over at The Tech Museum in San Jose. It feels pretty natural to move forward and back on it, but I nearly ran out of the little coned in area they had for it when I tried to figure out how to turn. It would definitely take a few minutes practice to get the hang of it. The 0-degree turn radius was very cool though.

I realized that what makes it look so strange is that the people riding it are not perceptably moving their bodies, yet they are moving. We’re used to seeing people move their arms and legs when they wark or at least their legs when they ride a bike.

The rest of the museum was standard-museum-type stuff. About 10% of the exhibits were broken at the time, probably from all the kids banging on stuff. We spent more time than we thought we would exploring the exhibits and we caught a pretty good IMAX film, Coral Reef Adventure. Part of it was shot in Fiji which was where we had our honeymoon, so watching it brought back good memories.

The people in the film were often talking about how dangerous diving was and how they had to avoid sharks, getting the bends and other underwater hazards. I couldn’t help but think that it might be easier if they didn’t have to swim around with that huge IMAX camera box between them.

It was a fun day though and we got to explore downtown San Jose a bit, which we really haven’t done since we lived here. There’s lots of caches there, so I’m sure we’ll be back.