If you’re spending a fortune and facing anti-histamine side effects like depression in your efforts to avoid the plague-like symptoms of Austin’s allergy season, there’s a new way to clear your sinus congestion. Don’t reach for the neti-pot – the pot that is to the congested man what a well placed finger down the throat is to the bulimic. Don’t start licking nettles and sucking off local bees. Instead turn to the 1600 horsepower sinus cleaning tunnel that is Austinville’s new hip place to hang out – iFly Austin.
My 1990 Mazda Miata (MX5) runs on something like 110 horse power, so this iFly building has something like fourteen Miatas dragging boogers out of your overloaded sinuses. The building is built something like a high energy particle accelerator, but instead of throwing protons around Geneva in a 17 mile circle in an attempt to disprove the existence of gods through study of the Higgs boson, it’s designed to cleanse and drain the paranasal sinuses of a person in a jump suit.
It works a little bit like this. You stand in the jump suit in a vertical tube, and a man in a lab coat with hipster glasses turns on four 400HP motors. They blow air sideways from the top of the tube, around the outside of the building through Return Air Tunnels (RATs) and back into the bottom of the tube. When you stand in the vertical tube, which is surrounded by curved glass, you feel initially like a worm at the bottom of a tequila bottle until the hipster labcoat dude cranks up the fans, causing the air to rush upwards past you and the grill that you’re standing on at up to 165 MPH.
I’m not sure when the last time you rode a motorbike at over 150MPH was, but I bet if you had any brains (remaining at the end of the jaunt), you had a full face helmet, rather than exposing your tender little face to flesh-tearing airflow.
The good news for the mucus-infested allergic Austinite is that no full-face helmet is available to the beginner at iFly – which means that the full fourteen Miatas are available to drive through the spandrel air pockets inside your skull and drive the boogers upwards in some kind of snot rapture.
The upside is clear – you leave feeling invigorated and slightly lighter in the sinuses than when you entered, without having to nearly drown yourself with the salt water of a neti-pot. And that feels good.
The downside is the recirculating nature of iFly Austin’s wind tunnel. All of the other lucky booger donors have similarly left the tunnel with their boogers liberated and recirculated. A collection of vaporized nose-phlegm being thrown into the following iFlyers’ wet membranes at 165 MPH.
I guess there’s some sort of mucus karma accounting system which monitors the conservation of tunnel snot. If you donate a pound from your nose, you withdraw a pound from the communal snot bank and it gets forced into your lungs instead.
Pingback: First Flight at iFly Austin