electric bikes!

And now, continuing our trip through the land of Groupon/Living Social/tons of other daily deal sites...electric bikes!:

By the Santa Monica Pier

This blog is making it seem like I'm buying daily deals nonstop, but I swear I'm not. Well, yes, I do buy them once in awhile. I know everyone says they're a guaranteed waste of money, but I'm finding them to be a great source of local stuff to do that I would never have found out about otherwise. 90% of the deals are for massages and Juvederm and tanning (which really are boring) but sometimes fun stuff comes up. Like this electric bike tour we bought from Pedal or Not. 

The tour first piqued my interest since I had heard a lot about electric bikes (mostly positive), but I never thought I'd get a chance to actually try one. Then I saw that Pedal or Not has a solid 5 out of 5 stars from 34 reviews on Trip Advisor. It seemed like a guaranteed winner--and it was.

Pedal or Not gives "semi-private" tours that are limited to 5 people, but we lucked out and had a real private tour since no one else was in our time slot! It was just our tour guide and us. The tour began in Santa Monica and we rode down the long and winding bike path along the beach to Venice where we wandered among the Venice canals (we're on a bridge over the canals in the photo above). 

It was probably a 7 mile ride roundtrip. Halfway through it, I was definitely depending more on that silver battery pack on the back of the bike than my leg muscles. You twist the handlebar like on a motorcycle to turn the motor on (or at least that's how I see people ride motorcycles on TV), and twisting it more makes you go faster. It is really a strange feeling to speed along on a bike without pedaling. It really took me awhile to convince my body that I was not going to topple over despite the fact that my feet were not moving.

We learned some interesting history about Venice and Santa Monica along the way, of course. And maybe it's still the New Yorker in me, but I was shocked by how polite everyone was. When we'd pass walking pedestrians on the bike path, our guide would say, "on your left, there's 3 people in our party" and most people would actually say "Thank you!" in response. I was surprised, to say the least. I don't think I'll ever really shake off that instant feeling of suspicion/wariness whenever a stranger engages me in public.