By Kyle Flannery
Maybe it's a sign of just how spoiled we’ve become as a society, but sometimes planning an annual summer vacation can feel like a downright burden. Once you’ve done the seaside sunning, the rustic camping, and the national parks, it’s easy to start asking oneself, “Is that all there is?” Most of us only get two weeks a year to escape, and yet it’s come to this — that wretched feeling of same old, same old.
This is the part where a travel magazine might tell you to drop a few hundred bucks on some Eddie Bauer excursion gear, extolling the virtues of white water rafting or rock climbing. Luckily, we're not a travel magazine — so we've got a much more novel idea. Send your ass into orbit.
BANG, ZOOM, STRAIGHT TO THE MOON!
If you thought we were kidding, the joke's on you (and your billion dollar savings account) because Space Adventures actually works with former Soviet launch operators to sling bored rich people into space. Penny pinchers can opt for a few minutes of zero gravity on a $3,950 parabolic flight, while the merely affluent can enjoy a sub-orbital circuit some 62 miles above Earth for $102,000. The wealthiest travelers can arrange to visit the infamously stinky International Space Station for a sobering $30 million. Once you’ve signed your personal fortune over to Iran’s new best friends, you'll be stuffed like an olive pimento into a Soyuz space capsule and shot out of a cannon by the Federal Space Agency of the Russian Federation. If you can afford to shell out $100 million for this kind of abuse, you can take it one step further by making history as only the 13th human to ever set foot on the moon. Land on the far side and it’ll be a first. If nothing else, you’ll end up with some great vacation slides. If you’d rather live vicariously (by sending someone else in your stead) and you’re an absurdly wealthy benefactor, you can reach me c/o Cybersocket.
There’s nothing like that good ol’ Communist can-do spirit. But if the missing bolts and knocking noises in the engine give you pause, Space Adventures has your back. They have plans to build modern spaceports in both Dubai and Singapore.
SHLEPPING UP MT. EVEREST
If your vacation budget isn’t unlimited, that's still no reason to skulk off to Fire Island for the umpteenth time. After the first 10 or 20 visits, the glow sticks and group sex can start to lose their allure. The edge of space may be elusive, but almost anyone can afford to touch the roof of the world at the summit of Mt. Everest. Responsible Travel offers no less than 19 different tour packages that will place you atop the world’s highest peak. The Classic Base Camp Trek is a steal at $880 per person (airfare excluded) and takes you from Katmandu to the Everest base camp at 5,300m above sea level in a mere 17 days.
BECOMING SHARK BAIT
Afraid of heights? Then go down. Shark Diver offers $3100, five-day packages that will take you from San Diego to the Mexican coast in search of Great White Sharks (you’re protected inside a metal dive cage.) Experienced divers can opt to seek out Red Demon Squids. Three massive hearts pump blue blood through the man-sized bodies of these intimidating cephalopods. The price for such horror? $3,300.
EXTRAORDINARY RENDITION — THE CLUB CIA GETAWAY
What could be more relaxing than a career in counter-espionage? If you crave a quick getaway that’s all about plausible deniability, we've got you covered — but if you tell anyone, we'll have to kill you. Incredible Adventures in Tucson, Arizona offers a unique Covert Ops Summer Camp for frustrated adult cubicle warriors. During your 3-day adventure, an elite team of former Green Berets and self-styled mercenaries will mentor you in espionage basics such as evasive driving, combat gunplay, surveillance, and booby trap detection. You'll also study unarmed combat techniques and participate in a hostage rescue exercise using paintball weapons. At $3,795 per person, it’s not exactly cheap — but here’s the good news. With all that Covert Ops training, you should have no trouble orchestrating a bank heist to pay for it.
CHERNOBYL, WHEN IT SIZZLES
If you’ve made it this far, you can forget about all the poser vacations we’ve just discussed. Why? Because real men vacation at nuclear disaster sites. Several local companies now offer Chernobyl tours, taking foolhardy travelers into the hot zone to look at the eerie abandoned towns, mutant plant life, and mad vagrants that now populate the outlaying regions around the reactor. Tours can be had for as little as $125, including free protective clobber and complimentary radiation exposure tests in worn-out vintage Soviet-era detectors. In the absence of any significant human presence in the hot zone during the past twenty years, nature has shown its incredible resiliency by blossoming into a veritable Eden for plants and wildlife. Some areas are quite safe, but just a few yards in the wrong direction can mean a lethal dose of radiation — and you’d never know ‘til it was too late. Because of this, it’s vital that you choose a guide who can safely lead you through the region’s invisible maze of death.
Kyle Flannery hasn’t been heard from since leaving for Nepal, claiming he had located the cave of Kanchanjunga Rachyyas, the legendary Yeti.
