Bored? Fly your Lawnchair a Couple Hundred Miles…

Recently a guy in the USA flew his lawn chair (and himself in it) almost 200 miles by floating it with helium balloons.

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If anyone I knew brought up this brilliant idea I’d have stopped talking to the person. He/she would have obviously been suffering from something that I’d rather not be part of. I’d just rather not know what the plan was and hear about it after it was all done because it had failure written all over it. Failure is one thing, but failure leading to death caused by stupidity is quite another.

That’s my initial impression. As I read the headline of the article my brother sent me by email I needed to read it 3 times (no joke) to try to get my head around it.

The full story is here >

As I read it I kept waiting for the punch line – or for the story to get outrageously ridiculous, gradually clueing me in on the farce.

There was no punchline. This guy really did this. He attached 105 large colored balloons to his chair and flew 193 miles in under 9 hours with the wind, reaching around 13,000 feet in altitude. Hey wait, don’t planes fly at 10,000 feet? Yes. Was he endangering whole groups of people? Yes. What happened to his chair after he landed? He couldn’t hold it down and it shot back into the sky without him. Isn’t that a serious hazard? Yes, I would call it that. This guy got nothing but praise from the group of people interviewing him though!

As I read the article I identified with his sense of adventure. I love to do new things. I love to do things that challenge me… things that I don’t think I can do, but I do them anyway just to see myself complete them.

I like to challenge myself by taking risks – small risks in comparison to this I think… I find that the biggest risks I take tend to be in the water in Hawaii.

I like to find some surf that’s breaking at 5-10 feet Hawaiian scale and see if I can:

1. Get in the water and paddle out.
2. Avoid getting cracked in the head by someone else’s surfboard.
3. Ride something, anything.
4. Grab some incredible rides.
5. Paddle back in without dying or getting caught on the coral reef as a few million gallons of saltwater churn me over it like grinding fresh meat that grandma used to make.

If I can do that – I have accomplished a LOT in my mind. I’ve been caught in what for me was just EPIC surf on the North Shore of Hawaii at a break called “Sunset” break. When I entered the water the sets were between 8-12 feet Hawaiian scale. When I got caught in the middle of a freak 20 foot set I was not really prepared for what ensued and almost drown numerous times.

I like to push it, but sometimes I think that I push it too far.

But, there is a whole group of people that REALLY push it far beyond what I ever attempt. This guy is one of those people. He had heard an unsubstantiated story about a guy flying with balloons attached to him and wanted to try it on his own. He actually contacted the first guy and they kind of planned it out together.

I don’t like all the risks this guy decided to take that could have affected other people – like if his lawnchair with 100 rubber balloons got stuck in the jet air intake of an airliner, but I do love the idea of just firing up some helium balloons and seeing where you go. Must have been such an incredible experience. This was actually his 2nd flight. On his first flight he ascended to 16,000 feet too quickly and popped too many of his balloons with a BB-gun and then descended too rapidly. This flight was more controlled in comparison.

Makes me wonder what hairy-scary idea I could challenge myself with!

Best of Life,

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