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By Lee
Ostaszewski
In today’s installment of Modern Aviation and Outdoor
Furniture News, we take a look at one man’s awe inspiring yet completely insane
dream to float from Oregon to Idaho via 105 brightly
colored helium-filled balloons tied to a lawn chair.
Amazingly,
he never made it to Idaho. But perhaps even more amazing was the fact
that he didn’t kill himself trying. And
as in the words of another great adventurer, Meriwether Lewis of the Lewis
and Clark Expedition LLC, who more than 200 years earlier traipsed about the
Northwest managing not to get killed, “With a name like Meriwether you either
learn to be tough, or you learn fashion design.”
But what do
we know about this modern-day adventurer, Kent Couch of Bend, Oregon,
and his flying lawn chair? Well, we
know this idea must have first come to him while he was sitting in his
backyard one afternoon daydreaming, or perhaps experiencing the results of altered
brain chemistry due to the ingestion of a certain plant that is a member of
the fungi family (I’m not saying he did, I’m just saying). That’s when he looked up into the deep blue
sky with those puffy white clouds and thought, whimsically, how wonderful it
would be if someday he could visit Idaho.
Personally,
I’ve never been to Idaho,
but I understand it is a great place and an extremely popular destination, especially
among many varieties of wild animals, some who manage to get there without floating
by helium balloons.
According
to the articles I read, while Couch never reached Idaho
he did manage to travel 193 miles in nine hours before landing in a farm field
near a part of earth called Union,
Ore. He was running low on water-filled bags
used for ballast, which controlled his altitude, and if he went further would
have had to cross another part of earth called Hells
Canyon. Going strictly on
the names alone, he seemed to have made a wise decision. As wise a decision as anyone who is willing
to float thousands of feet in the air on lawn furniture could be expected to
make.
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But his
adventurous travel option started me thinking: What other insane travel plans
do people have for the summer. And by
people, I don’t mean normal people like you and I whose
most daring travel exploit is deciding to leave the car in the long-term
airport parking lot for the week. Or
trusting to house sit the multi-pierced high school girl down the street with
the boyfriend who you think you recognize from “America’s Most Wanted” and has a
car that due to how he speeds through the neighborhood must not run properly
below 60 miles an hour.
As daring
as those travel arrangements might be, I’m thinking more along the lines of the
group I read about which headed out last week from New
York to Spain
in a Stone Age replica boat made out of lashed-together reeds and which is powered
by sail and rowing.
Their goal
is to prove wrong those scientists who insist that while it was possible for
Stone Age people to get from Europe to America
following the prevailing winds, they were unable to get from America back to Europe
because of an almost complete lack of competent travel agents in the area.
This tells
me that the head of the reed boat project is the kind of guy who will do
anything not to lose a bar bet. Here
is someone willing to spend years constructing a replica of a Stone Age boat
and risk the lives of 12 crew members sailing it across the Atlantic
just to show that he is right. I have
conceded arguments that would have taken me nothing more strenuous than opening
up the newspaper sports section to win.
The trip is
expected to take several weeks. And as
I understand it, not a single entertainer was booked, not even Celine Dion, whom I think would
be an absolute minimum for a long, transatlantic cruise such as this. On top of that, because the vessel design
was taken from 10,000-year-old cave dweller paintings, the planned lido deck was
also scrapped.
I know what
you are thinking: Spain’s
extremely nice this time of year as well as being chock full of history and
wine and Spaniards and stuff, but let’s be honest, it isn’t Idaho.
Well, then
again, what is? ■
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