Airborne!

A man in Bend, Oregon is making national news -- with his bizarre flight of fancy, sitting in a lawn chair, hanging from 100 helium balloons, floating over 200 miles across Oregon at 11,000 feet.

From the Bulletin:

“The good part was getting to see the terrain,” said the gas station owner from Bend. “I went through the John Day River system, which was beautiful. And I was glad it was all working the way it should have.”

But it wasn’t all fun and games for Couch, who started out on the northeast side of Bend and made his way 193 miles, as the crow flies, in eight hours and 45 minutes.

“There was that mountain range by Anthony Lakes, and I dreaded going over that because there were these little bouts of wind (pulling me around) and that has never happened before,” Couch said. “It was spooky, because there were no good places to land. If I had landed out there nobody would have found me for days.”

Even though he didn’t make it Idaho like had he hoped, the experience was, in a lot of ways, dreamy. Way up in the wild blue yonder, Couch could hear cows mooing and kids talking. He heard gun shots, which worried him. While he was at 11,000 feet, a black butterfly flew past him. The clouds he passed through, he said, were fluffy.

There's a lot more - so read the rest. Discuss.