In the list of my favourite come-on lines for weird-ass activities, this one has just zoomed into first place:
“Have you ever dreamed of being carried into the sky by a giant bouquet of colorful toy balloons?”
It’s called cluster ballooning. Here’s the gist of it:
The pilot wears a harness, to which a cluster of large, helium-filled balloons are attached.† Control is achieved by releasing ballast to ascend, or by bursting balloons to descend.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m guessing you want to take the balloon-bursting one at a time, with some careful reflection between bursts. “I guess that was one too many” isn’t a sentence you really want to find yourself thinking.
The most famous cluster balloonist was a rank amateur, Larry Walters, who thought he’d drift peacefully over the local neighbourhood by tying helium balloons to his lawn chair. Instead, he shot up to 16,000 feet and the approach path for Long Beach Municipal Airport, where Delta and TWA airline pilots radioed in his position. Walters made his descent by shooting some of the balloons with a BB gun he’d brought with him (planning being everything in this business), and landed safely.
This is a metaphor for something, but I’m damned if I can figure out what.
