The Bergerons
The owners
Meet the Bergerons, the first family of the New Orleans bike tour & rental industry.
Ryan’s family first set foot in the territory in the 1690’s – 13 generations ago. His great-grandfather, French-Canadian soldier Barthélemy Bergeron d’Amboise, accompanied Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville (the founder of New Orleans) on many military and exploratory expeditions through Canada and the Louisiana Territory.
Melissa’s family migrated from Paris in the 1750’s. Her New Orleans lineage includes a multitude of famous jazz musicians, riverboat captains and the architect who built the first New Orleans skyscraper; her father is the drummer of arguably the most famous living musician from the 1960’s, and is on a ‘Never Ending Tour.’
Though Ava is young, she’s off to a grand beginning; she’s an exemplary student, and her interest and talent in the arts are beginning to blossom. To celebrate Ava’s birth, her grandfather wrote her a song called, ‘Ava Magnolia.’ It is a track on the Grammy Award winning album, Dockside Sessions (Best Regional Roots Album category), by Zydeco artist Terrance Simien. Here’s the link if you’d like to hear it.
10 years ago, nudged along by the news that they were going to be parents of the beautiful & charismatic Ava Magnolia, Ryan & Melissa saw an opportunity to create a niche service that did not exist in the New Orleans tourism industry, bicycle tourism.
During many midnight conversations on the living room sofa, the plan for The American Bicycle Rental Company was developed. We found a small office in the back of the French Quarter, bought 12 American-made bikes from the country’s oldest (and last) bike manufacturer, and began working 7 days a week for the next many years to build this new service and spread the word throughout the city. Riding the success of the rental company, and listening to the requests from their customers for bike tours, Ryan & Melissa launched FreeWheelin’ Bike Tours with Teddy (Ryan’s cousin) as the company’s first (and only) tour guide.
A decade has passed, and despite the rise of a multitude of competitors (the “copy & paste krewe” as we call them), the implementation of a bike share program that decimated locally owned bike rental & tour businesses e.g. Blue Bikes (an Uber subsidiary) , unusually regular street flooding (that rarely happened before Hurricane Katrina), a hotel collapse just two blocks away, dubious practices by online business listing platforms, and constant hurdles thrown before us by the tragically inept and aloof City Hall, our companies are still battling to stay atop the ultra-competitive bicycle tourism industry.
Being trailblazing entrepreneurs in a tourism-centric city hasn’t been easy, but the rewards of smiling customers the world over has been worth all of the headaches, setbacks, long hours and hard work.
The Bergerons love their home town of New Orleans and would love nothing more than to host you for a bike tour or rental during your visit to the one and only Crescent City.
What are you waiting for mes amis? You can’t get a more New Orleans than FreeWheelin’ unless you can summon Iberville from the great beyond. Click over to the tour page that interests you most and book your next great vacation experience – we’ll see you soon!
