Tours in North Reading

Paramotor Tours sends adventurers skyward on the wings of motor-powered paragliders. Nationally certified pilots adhere strictly to FAA safety regulations as they strap in for tandem flights, lifting thrill seekers to heights of up to 8,000 feet. To help ensure smooth takeoffs and landings, each glider boasts several safety features, including reserve parachutes, GPS navigation, and a pause button. Adventurers who wish to pilot their own glider can sign up for a solo-flying course, available on select days.

After years of teaching preschool, Sue Merlino graduated to a new passion in life when she turned her enthusiasm for bicycling and her hometown into a career exploring Concord's history atop a two-wheeler. Her resulting brainchild, Concord Bike Tours, wends through the heavily treed lanes of the city, elucidating the history of notable locations such as the Emerson House, the abodes of lesser-known abolitionists, and the site where Thoreau kissed his first tree. Four regularly run tours take up to 10 bicyclists on 2.5- to 3-hour journeys, with optional sidecars for children younger than 8 provided. Sue and her family will also plot custom trips for clients interested in longer rides, different scenery, or preparing for a Jeopardy! audition.

While navigating segways around the Alamo during a spring vacation, Brad Biscornet and his brother-in-law, Jeff Langone, realized that their hometown of Salem, with its rich history and picturesque views, was ripe for just this sort of experience. And thus, Witch City Segway was born—allowing visitors and locals alike to explore the historic town on a thoroughly modern mode of transportation.

After briefly training up to six helmeted guests in segway piloting at the company's 2,000-square-foot indoor facility, two guides—one up front, one bringing up the rear—lead their flock onto the streets for one-hour jaunts. As the guides casually relay notable anecdotes about jail sites and cemeteries without the aid of megaphones or earpieces, guests obtain a deeper understanding of the 17th-century witch trials and the lesser-known black-cat mistrials.

Kim and Corey were working for a ghost-story tour company in Salem when they noticed something. Well, it wasn't really something, so much as the absence of something that caught their attention. Tourists walked away from their ghost-story tours disappointed, seeking a more intimate encounter with the famous bumps in the Salem night. So the duo decided to start their own tour company, putting their private practice to good use. They founded Paranormal Salem and armed their guests with ghost-detecting equipment before taking them to some of Salem's most notoriously haunted sites.

Their ghost tour's hands-on style has earned them accolades such as Best New England Attraction of 2012 from About.com, and a featured spot on the Biography Channel's My Ghost Story. Their late night tour begins at the Witch Trials Memorial before embarking on a two-hour exploration of indoor and outdoor sites that are rife with stories of ethereal sightings, strange noises, and eerie stomach growls.

David Goldstein could be considered a renaissance man: he's organized skiing trips and city bar crawls, founded a murder-mystery dinner theater, and led team-building exercises—one of which focused on sharing his passion for chocolate. As this particular venture garnered public demand, he began traveling across the country to meet with chocolatiers and cocoa experts. In 2009, he returned to Boston and focused his findings and theatrical flair into sweets-focused tours—what he now refers to as his passion business.

Today, his team includes chocolate-experience designer Caitlin, two chocolate tour guides, Count Chocula, three pastry-chef chocolatiers, and a wine expert who teaches wine-and-chocolate pairings. The guides lead guests on walking tours and a cupcake crawl through three of Boston's historic neighborhoods, taking them to boutique chocolate shops, bakeries, ice-cream parlors, and a cosmetics company that uses chocolate in its products. In hands-on workshops, chocolatiers teach students how to form truffles, make fillings, hand mold chocolate, and package confections.

Freewheeling around historic hallmarks and architecture, Boston By Segway, formerly Boston Gliders, has led more than 100,000 sightseers through Bean Town atop intuitive, easy-to-maneuver segways. Tours, which kick off every half-hour, range from one to two hours; the shorter version trundles down Boston's Harborwalk, and the longer sojourn ventures past historic hotspots including Faneuil Hall and Bunker Hill. To get acquainted with the segway, all upright rollers speed through a half-hour how-not-to-crash course, getting acquainted with the natural, fluid steering and learning how to propel the vehicle forward using a carrot tied to a stick. Armed with digital cameras, the urban sherpas snap shots throughout the tour for purchase afterward, and customers may take their own pictures as long as they briefly hop off the segway.