6 Insane Summer Camps That Will Make You Wish You Were a Kid

Campers will be given instruction in blast mining, underground demolition, and pyrotechnics. In addition to surface-blasting quarries and traveling deep into a lead mine to set off TNT clusters, accepted students will get to strap explosive charges to watermelons, Care Bears, and eerily trussed-up Barbie dolls, because even experienced professionals haven't completely moved beyond the "tying firecrackers to G.I. Joes" phase that set them on their career paths in the first place.

As we mentioned earlier, a portion of the camp is focused on pyrotechnics, with the goal of making theatrical explosions for movies and television. To that end, the campers get to create controlled "walls of fire," which are exactly what they sound like:

They will also put together a fireworks show using commercial-grade ordnance that could blow the ass off of an elephant. On one hand, we assume the FBI monitors each member of the applicant pool for a minimum of five years after camp ends, but on the other, we still totally want to go.

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The campers start small, with 2-foot jumps and simple mat tumbles, but by the end of their stay, they'll be punching and kicking each other off of 32-foot scaffolding towers and diving headlong into padded ravines, which are legitimately marketable career skills for a teenager living in California.

They'll also learn stage combat, swordplay, and other faux-fighting techniques to ensure each one of them a role as a nameless henchman who gets his neck snapped by Jason Statham in a shipyard fire. At the end of the week, the campers participate in a choreographed stunt show involving every technique they've learned. We assume Michael Bay attends each show incognito to scout for the best Megan Fox lookalikes to shoot out of a cannon or whatever in his upcoming Ninja Turtles movie.

But if you want just a touch more realism, you'll probably want to turn things up a notch in ...

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You will also be trained in Krav Maga so you can break the shit out of any nefarious arms that foolishly attempt to grab you, and you will be thrown headfirst into dramatic training exercises, such as rescuing a bunch of hostages from a bus, to prove your worth to your commanders.

It all builds up to War Night, wherein you and your squad must plan an intricate covert operation and carry it out without getting pretend-murdered by ruthless enemy combatants. These stealth missions could be anything from planting listening devices in an opposing camp to stealing sensitive documents from a heavily guarded installation, easily beating out the paintball game you played at "Big Larry's Ball-Splatterin' Thunder Ranch" or wherever it was you went for last year's team-building retreat. It's essentially a fantasy camp for people who want to be Eric Bana in Munich.

Not many camps can give you PTSD, but a week's worth of Mossad combat experience might do the trick if you spend the rest of the year slumped behind a desk or a cash register. So the next time Joe-Joe from Receiving takes your clearly labeled lunch bag from the break room refrigerator, you can respond with deadly force and hip toss him through the Pepsi machine.

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Arguably the most important aspect of ninjutsu is stealth, as a non-stealthy ninja is essentially Jackie Chan, and he probably has his own fantasy camp. To reflect this, Ninja Camp USA places a heavy emphasis on nighttime stealth tactics, stealth competitions, and camouflaging techniques that teach you to utilize your surroundings, like when Arnold Schwarzenegger painted himself up with mud in Predator. There are also high-ropes courses for strength and agility training, because any ninja worth her salt has to be able to descend from above like a stabby raindrop:

On completion, all campers receive a certificate of stealth to take home, which you can then hang on your wall along with your diplomas.

Everyone also gets to take home a set of throwing knives and a ninja uniform, so they can put their stealth training to the test by robbing the hell out of the nearest gas station.

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The camp, named after that place where Hugo Weaving lives in The Lord of the Rings, tossed kids into the Tolkien universe and tasked them with defending the world of men from Sauron's army of evil.

In addition to learning basic swordfighting and combat skills, campers would build forts and functioning catapults, which already puts them a step above the local LARPing society that meets in the field behind the YMCA every Wednesday for a spirited pre-Shoney's arena battle. And since orcs are pretty thin on the ground in Calgary, the villainous monsters were played by volunteers among the campers' dads, allowing many children to revenge themselves against their fathers for blaming that hot dog fart on them during the cramped family drive down to Disney World.

Unfortunately, Camp Rivendell wasn't exactly endorsed by J.R.R. Tolkien's estate, and the camp received a cease and desist order to change its name. So, they redressed the whole thing as Arcatheos, a thinly veiled Game of Thrones fantasy camp without any legally ensnaring references, but with most of the original programs intact.

In addition to the swordplay and fort building, campers now learn how to live a "castle life," which is a fancy way of saying "bury their poop in piles of straw and be convinced everything around them is haunted." Also, the kids can return year after year and progress into knighthood, then subsequently mentor a whole new generation of Arcatheos squires, which isn't a bad way to spend five days every summer.

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For $10,000, you can spend six nights on the Kapama Private Game Reserve in South Africa, taking daily safari tours and blazing through the skies in a Russian MiG-21 fighter jet, smashing two of everyone's childhood fantasies together like a pair of jackknifing big rigs in an ice storm.

Incredible Adventures will set you up with this weeklong vacation as part of the MiG-21 Supersonic Club, unsurprisingly founded by a man whose personal mission statement is "speed, speed, and more speed!!!" The exclamation points are his.

The Kapama Reserve is a 50-square-mile compound filled with the most popular African wildlife. Twice each day you'll have the option of being driven through the reserve by a guide, where you will get closer to elephants, lions, rhinos, and leopards than half of our readers have ever been to a VCR:

The enclosed park ensures that you don't have to drive more than an hour to see the entire cast of The Lion King, cutting what is routinely an excruciatingly long scavenger hunt for most safari tours down to a single afternoon. And you can do it twice a day for the entire trip.

When you aren't absorbing every precious glimpse you get of some of the rarest creatures on Earth, you'll be screaming through the sky just below the stratosphere in a Russian jet flying faster than fucking thunder. You get one 30- to 45-minute flight per vacation, which may seem short until you consider that that half-hour will be spent inside a supersonic jet taking you on a soaring adventure loaded with tremendous explosions of speed. They even let you man the controls at one point.

You can schedule additional flights if you want to (and have unlimited funds), although the website isn't clear whether buzzing the animals while blaring the theme from Top Gun is an option on the standard vacation package or something that costs extra.

Related Reading: Some people should have nothing to do with kids. For more proof of that, read about PETA's child propaganda games. If the whole "indoctrinating children" thing still has your attention, this comic book about cyborg Sean Hannity fighting future liberals will surely brighten your day. Keep the irresponsible children's media streak alive with utterly insane Peanut's specials. You haven't seen Charlie Brown until you've seen him mourning war dead!