It’s not every day a news story causes me to almost hurl breakfast, but here it is: an nausea-inducing LA Times story about “glamping” — luxury camping. (MidCurrent picked up this one too, so we assume Marshal’s already lost his breakfast.)

Glamping is the fast-growing segment of the travel industry where people pretend to interface with nature while a staff of servile lackeys hover in the background, keeping the food coming, the heated tents clean, the private bathrooms in tip-top condition, and (presumably) the animals at a nice, safe distance.

The outdoors? We looked hard, but we couldn’t find it anywhere in the LAT Times story. Helpful hint? Don’t stray too far from your own bathroom while reading the story. You’re gonna to want to blow chunks:

When 6-year-old Ethan Bondick told his mom and dad he wanted to go fly-fishing in Montana, his well-heeled parents were stumped.

“We looked at each other and said, ‘Oh, god, now what?’ ” said Gigi Bondick, 37, a “reformed” attorney whose husband works as a private-equity partner in Massachusetts.

“We’re just not the camping kind of people. We don’t pitch tents. We don’t cook outdoors. We don’t share a bathroom. It’s just not going to happen. This is a kid who has never flown anything but first class or stayed anywhere other than a Four Seasons.”

If anyone wonders how our “not the camping kind of people” solved this heart-rending problem, read on:

The Bondicks, who live in a sprawling home on the edge of a state park outside Boston and hire a personal chef at home, shelled out $595 a night — plus an additional $110 per person per day for food.

It’s a hefty price to sleep in a tent, but the perks include a camp butler to build their fire, a maid to crank up the heated down comforter at nightfall and a cook to whip up bison rib-eye for dinner and French toast topped with huckleberries for breakfast.

It gets worse. Really.

The bathhouses, a short walk from the tents, have heated slate floors, a rain-forest shower big enough for two, granite countertops and artisan mountain sage soap.

But even that is too much roughing it for some families. After two nights, David Blake, 46, of Boston and his family abandoned their tent in favor of more luxurious digs: a 1,440-square-foot timbered home on four acres.

I tried to compose a series of bitingly satirical passages to wrap up this post, but in a classic case of truth trumping fiction, I was stumped — the characters in this story are a far stronger parody of campers than anything I could invent.

After all, on my recent backpacking trip into the Smokies, I bought the instant oatmeal with the separate packet of “crunch flavoring” and thought that was pretty luxurious.

Then again, with well-heeled “hunters” shooting “trophies” in caged enclosures and well heeled “fly fishers” catching pellet-fed, stocked trout in private streams and thumping their chests over the feat, why should campers be any different?

As always, Undergrounders, the floor is yours. Is glamping just another facet of a society that can’t quite come to grips with nature, or a sure sign of the impending apocalypse?

See you in the heated, slate-floored bathrooms, Tom Chandler.

[tags]camping, glamping, luxury camping[/tags]

Posted in Underground Entertainment.