A team of documentary filmmakers completed its quest to pilot the Segway Human Transporter across the United States on Tuesday as rider Josh Caldwell successfully navigated his trusty scooter across an invisible finish line in plain view of the Atlantic Ocean. Looking tired and cold, but enthused by his achievement, Caldwell posed for pictures in front of a small gathering of interested onlookers, reporters and Segway enthusiasts.
When Lewis and Clark went looking for America, they used horses. The settlers that followed them used covered wagons, then trains. When Buz and Tod started on their own televised search via “Route 66,” it was in a snazzy ‘59 Corvette. In “Easy Rider,” Captain America and Billy tried to find America while riding on laid-back Harley Davidson Panheads. Alon Waisman and his friends are trying yet another way.
In the early years of the automotive era, daring journeys of what were then unimaginable distances, over roads that would hardly qualify by today’s standards, helped establish the reliability of the new technology. Men like Erwin G. Baker, known as Cannonball, became legends on these coast-to-coast odysseys, setting records with each attempt. Now four 20-somethings are on their way from Seattle to Boston on a pair of Segway Human Transporters, the motorized, self-balancing scooters whose inventor has predicted that they will open a revolutionary era in personal transportation.
Imagine slowing life down so much you actually take time to get to know strangers every day. Now imagine that the strangers are worth getting to know. That’s been the life for three men and a woman, all in their 20s, who are doing what many people only dream of: quitting their office jobs and driving across the country.
Like many people, Hunter Weeks and Josh Caldwell, both 27, got disgusted with sitting in a cubicle, working the standard 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. shift. But unlike those who kept with the status quo, Weeks and Caldwell decided to chuck it all and wander across America.
Last week, Tech Talk introduced you to four Principia College graduates and their two companions traveling across the country using a Segway, the two-wheeled scooter being promoted as the urban commuter tool of the future.
TOPEKA, Kan. - Inside a coffee house in southwest Topeka, a documentary film crew interviewed Topekans last week for a sense of the modern-day American dream.
Maureen Coulter and her family had some unexpected houseguests this weekend. Coulter received a call from a group of twenty-somethings last week who had given up their corporate jobs to travel cross country on a Segway scooter, asking for a place to stay.
You know a vehicle has arrived when somebody decides to drive it from coast to coast in the United States and make a documentary about his experience. But until now, no one has ever attempted the 6,900-kilometre trek on an electric scooter.
In early August, three film makers set out from Seattle to make America at 10 mph, a documentary about a road trip on a scooter known as a Segway. Filmmaker Josh Caldwell has been navigating the scooter. NPR’s Liane Hansen checks in with Caldwell at about the midway point on his journey, in Norton, Kansas.
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