`Yeeee-haaaaaa!”
Such are the exuberant cries of Billy Crystal and his cohorts as they take to the range in ”City Slickers,” the hit movie about a trio of jaded New Yorkers who find new zest for living on an exciting Western cattle drive. The film`s blend of humor, travel adventure and drama has touched a nerve with audiences, and while ”City Slickers” spoofs such vacations, it also reflects the real-life transformations that happen when travelers act out their Walter Mitty fantasies.
”It becomes a life-changing experience,” said Richard Bangs, owner of Sobek Expeditions, a Northern California tour company that offers many exotic trips, including Alaskan dog sledding. ”It is often the impetus for big relationship, attitude or career changes. We see it all the time. It is a phenomenon that is a day-to-day occurrence in our business.”
Gene Kilgore, author of Ranch Vacations, a comprehensive guide to more than 300 Western-style ”dude ranches,” said that while the movie is exaggerated, the type of trip it portrays, and its effects, are based in reality. ”The wide open spaces and the camaraderie give you a whole new perspective,” he said. ”It gives you a new sense of yourself.”
Western cattle ranches started taking guests-called ”dudes”-around the turn of the century. Today, many ranches are just rustic settings for fly-fishing, cross-country skiing or golf, but there are about a dozen left that give wannabe cowpokes a chance to test their mettle. Spanish Springs Ranch, a 70,000-acre working ranch in northeast California, is one of the largest.
Don`t expect danger
But don`t expect the hair-raising predicaments portrayed in the film, which depicts gunplay, a rainstorm river-crossing and a stampede.
”No rancher would want those kinds of things to happen to their guests,” Kilgore said. ”There would be lawyers all over.”
Bangs, like the buddies in ”City Slickers,” has been on many adventure vacations. He says the trips offer a chance to ”reinvent yourself” and escape the everyday.
”We all get stuck in routines,” he said. ”It`s only when you break out of those molds-spiritually and physically-and stretch yourself out that you are challenged in life.”
The more challenging of such trips are best suited to individuals, Bangs said, and he doesn`t advise them for a duo seeking a salve for a creaky relationship. ”More often than not, it will make the differences stand out, not bring (the couple) together.”
Here is a sampling of trips designed to feed those Walter Mitty yearnings:
– Calling all city slickers. ”Your butt is going to get sore. Let`s just get that clear at the start,” said Gail Good, the good-humored manager of TX Ranch, a mom-and-pop variety of working cattle guest ranch near Lovell, Wyo.
”It is not like one of those places where you go down a little trail and they show you things,” she said. ”You rope, you move herds from one place to another, and sometimes you do a little fence building. There is always work to be done.”
Guests at the TX Ranch sleep in tents, ride 8 to 16 hours a day and eat meals prepared by Good`s mom, who came up with the idea of taking on ”dudes” in 1977. Now the family takes up to 20 guests at a time, trained primarily by Good`s cowboy brother, Hip.
”It doesn`t matter if you have even seen a real horse before,” Good said. ”Hip matches you up with the right kind of horse. He`s good about that.” Actually, sister Latahna is about as skilled as Hip, but ”people come to see a cowboy, not a cowgirl,” Good said.
As in the ”City Slickers” movie, the ranch draws a mixed bunch. ”Oh, yes, we get all sizes, shapes and colors. We get people who are very quiet and very outgoing.”
And while there haven`t been any stampedes lately, there are some mishaps, like the gentleman who broke his arm because ”he jumped off his horse because he thought it was going to hit a tree.”
Most visitors come to the TX Ranch from May to August, but some of the more rugged types-including some 10-year veterans-come in October to drive the cattle to market. It is a rough, and sometimes snowy, trip.
– Three, two, one . . . liftoff! Adults can be ”weekend astronauts” at Space Camp, at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Ala. The NASA program began as a hands-on spaceflight program for kids. The Space Camp branch in Titusville, Fla., does not have adult programs.
The Adult Space Academy three-day package, offered most weekends May through October, is a rapid-fire orientation using such simulators as the Centrifuge and leading up to a team space mission project. Team members stay in a dormitory, don flight suits and adopt call names such as ”Wing Walker” or ”Mustang.”
The center also has an advanced Space Academy class and an Aviation Challenge program geared to fighter pilot training. Participants use the latest flight simulators and take a 110-foot ”parachute drop” into a lake amid the simulated roaring wash of a helicopter.
The programs, while not exactly hazardous, are ”no walk in the park,”
Davis said. A doctor`s certificate of health is required. Space Camp also has a parent-child program, but it is almost entirely booked for this year.
– Vrooom, vrooom, mon amour. Race-car driving is a fantasy for more than a few grown-up kids, testifies John Peterson, owner of Franham Racing of Minnetonka, Minn. The company puts amateurs in the driver`s seat for European- style car racing on the French Riviera.
The training takes place at the Winfield school, between Marseilles and Toulon, where successful students are recruited for genuine competitive racing. (In fact, 22 Franham clients have gone on to do the real Formula One circuit.) Despite a wide range of walks of life and ages from 18 to 80 (though few women participate), the racers develop special bonds, Peterson said.
Peterson, a former professional racer, described the experience as not just a competition with others but also with oneself. ”It`s all in your own hands. No one can help you once you are in there. Things happen very fast. And there is a certain amount of danger-but you don`t think about that, because you know you are not going to make a mistake.”
– Mush! Mush! Mush! Gates of the Arctic, a new Sobek Expeditions dog-sledding trip, takes participants on a nine-day journey through Alaska`s remote Arctic National Park.
Sobek owner Bangs recently responded to the call of the wild by sampling the trip. ”The instruction only takes about a half-hour. At first, you are falling off and you are sort of klutzy, but after a while you feel like a veteran. . . . You are whipping along in the snow, the wind in your face. It is exciting and exhilarating, and you really know you are alive.”
The trips are scheduled only from January to April because after that the ice turns to, well, mush.
