Dartmouth Grad Creates Summer Camp For Yuppies
Are you a recent college graduate living in Manhattan? Does the white-collar job you kept at the expense of thousands of others not excite you anymore? Has New York City turned dull after living and working there for nearly three months? Well you don't have to stay in your comfortable rut anymore!
Dartmouth grad and former Wall Streeter Maia Josebachvili started Urban Escapes NYC, a company that organizes outdoor expeditions--backpacking, rock climbing, fruit picking, and the like--for yuppies bored with New York. Excursions on offer for the gainfully employed range from one-day hikes for $55 to a week in the Yucatan Peninsula for $600. Of course if you opt for the latter, you may not be gainfully employed for much longer once those photos from that nightclub in Playa del Carmen are posted on Flickr.
The high costs of these trips are actually fair deals when you consider transportation, guides, and food. And when compared to other enterprises from Ivy Leaguers, Urban Escapes is a worthwhile venture. However, there is still this air of pretentiousness about Josebachvili's company. Urban professionals who have already lost interest in New York paying a significant amount of money (whitewater rafting costs about the same as a senior week wine tour) to leave the city and rough it for a day or two. The website also says that on these trips you'll "meet fantastic and interesting new people in a totally different setting." Because it's so hard to meet new people on your own when you're in a city of 8 million people. You can't really Facebook friend someone until you share a kayak with them.
Business may start booming for Urban Escapes NYC next week though. CNN.com ran an article/advertisement on Tuesday about the company and sent author Nkechi Nneji on one of the excursions. Although it's hard to take Smith (or Smif) alum Nneji's piece seriously when you see the excruciating detail she includes about her experience.
After perusing the site, I rather nervously picked a $59 six-mile hike...I hadn't been hiking in years and still am sadly out of shape. My imagination ran wild with images of young, sporty folks racing up high peaks as I huffed and puffed behind. Terrifying.
After a rainy start to the morning, our upbeat guides for the day, director Bram Levy and guide Roget Lerner, drove a group of 12 north of the city to Harriman State Park. They encouraged us to get to know each other and joked that we would be quizzed on it later.
[...]
After an hourlong drive, we arrived at our hiking destination. Levy and Lerner checked our sneakers, water supply and told us a bit about how the day was going to unfold. And then we began the hike.
Wait, you left out important things! How did you get to the park? Did you take the Palisades Parkway or I-87? What flavor of granola bars did you bring? Did the guides play that "two truths and a lie" game with everyone? What was the barometric pressure? I need to know these things!
Urban Escapes just doesn't make sense to me. Leave it to an Ivy Leaguer to create a company designed for Manhattanites with professional jobs who want to get out and experience the living in nature for a weekend. It just seems so much easier and cheaper to become a hobo.
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July 2nd, 2009 at 3:21 pm
meh. as a hudson valley resident, i can tell you, while its all very pretty, it isn’t very exciting.
sure the hiking is fun, but i wouldn’t pay 60 bucks for it. if you want to hike, you can basically take metro north to wherever (i think you can still do the stop at breakneck ridge were they just let you off in a field.) metro north costs 15 bucks max. but i guess for someone who has never been hiking before this is kinda good.
July 2nd, 2009 at 3:21 pm
The only reason I enjoyed this article was because I think this is a really great idea and I will definitely do one of the shorter trips soon. So, thanks for telling me about this.
But, I also think that you are probably way off the mark by pegging this as some elitist camping thing.
This seems to be just like the DOC (Dartmouth Outing Club), our most popular student organization, but for young grads. The DOC has dozens of these types of trips weekly, and over 95% of pre-frosh elect to go on the 5-day pre-orientation trips. Trust me, there is nothing pretentious about it.
Anyways, congrats to Maia for thinking of this first, because I think this is going to be really successful.
July 2nd, 2009 at 4:36 pm
I feel that the picture chosen for this article does not represent a true Dartmouth grad. They should be playing with paddles.
July 2nd, 2009 at 10:12 pm
I was going to say the same thing as biggreen’13… no self respecting Dartmouth grad would allow beirut to be played on one of these trips. Shame.
July 3rd, 2009 at 10:48 pm
oh look another Ivy League grad enamored with themselves and reeking with pretentiousness… oh and I’m talking about you Max not Maia…
July 4th, 2009 at 7:32 am
Hey Max Wasserman, Cornell ‘09 – Take a look in the mirror. You probably just graduated from a school that barely belongs in the IVY league with the grandeur illusion that you would amount to something with your over priced education. I bet by now you’ve moved back into your parent’s basement with hopes that some employer will come calling and offering you a position as a glorified coffee maker, just so that you can pretend to be one of those “yuppy new yorkers” you seem to despise so much. It seems to me like Urban Escapes is not only a great idea in a failing economy, but an avenue for success – something I’m sure you’ll never learn a thing about. Do us all a favor and go play in traffic.
July 4th, 2009 at 5:39 pm
Have you ever met Maia, the founder of Urban Escapes? If you had, you’d realize that Urban Escapes is a little bit more than your short-sighted self seems to comprehend. It is people like you that make me ashamed to be an ivy-league graduate. Congrats Max, well-researched and fab article.
July 5th, 2009 at 11:17 am
The most hilarious part of this to me is that most New York “men” are so wimpy that they can’t drive themselves out to the trailhead and hike on their own.
July 6th, 2009 at 12:35 am
dear max wasserman,
it seems like you’re having some trouble wrapping your mind around the idea of pretentiousness. something that is pretentious is characterized by unwarranted or inflated self-importance and a sort of disingenuous affectation. one example might be starting a blog written by, about, and for an “elite” class of people, say, ivy league students and alums. getting groups of people together to hang out in the woods…not so pretentious.
thanks for the irony, i enjoyed that.
July 6th, 2009 at 10:01 am
“Leave it to an Ivy Leaguer to create a company designed for Manhattanites with professional jobs who want to get out and experience the living in nature for a weekend.”
I’m a bit confused. Is this a dig? Considering that so many of these people might be pressed for time, money and not own a car, this actually seems to be a rational business model. In fact, I believe the company was doing very well before the CNN article was published.
Having been on a trip with them before (it’s a great time), and knowing Maia from school (least pretentious girl ever), I’ll just have to attribute the tone of your post to being either clueless or wishing you came up with the idea first.
July 7th, 2009 at 1:09 pm
I’m sorry, but any Dartmouth-educated former Wall Streeter who now makes money by selling “Kayak & Wine” expeditions to Manhattan yuppies deserves to be derided if only because it is oh so terribly cliche. And I’m speaking as a Cornell-educated banker who just returned from a weekend of canoeing in Algonquin. We drank beer and were without a guide, though, thank you.
And yes advertising copy with such lines as “our guides will lay out a gourmet picnic lunch and you’ll have the treat of a private winetasting” is pretentious. Now quit trying to defend Dartmouth. We all know it is full of rich white kids who like to spend time outdoors before entering the corporate world. There’s no need to apologize for this fact.
Kudos to Max for the dig.
July 9th, 2009 at 3:33 pm
now cayuga, let’s not forget about the kids who worked hard in high school in order to be able to hang out with the cool dartmouth kids and hey, maybe one day establish their own old boy network.