Skip to main content

Man’s Man Travel – 3 Badass Father’s Day Vacations

By Mike Richard Dec 17, 2019 12:16 PM

Bear Grylls Survival Academy — 1. Bear Grylls Survival Academy
2. Beer Sampler
3. Western River Expeditions Grand Canyon Rafting

Beer Sampler — 1. Bear Grylls Survival Academy
2. Beer Sampler
3. Western River Expeditions Grand Canyon Rafting

Modern Nomad is a weekly column dedicated to mobile gear, must-see world destinations, tips for life on the road, and traveling better through technology.

Recommended Videos

Your dad doesn’t need another tie, drill kit, or kitschy bit of golf memorabilia. Why not think far outside the gift box this Father’s Day? If your pop is the no-nonsense, beer-swilling outdoorsman type, here are three extreme vacations you can bond over.

#1: Bear Grylls Survival Academy

Bear Grylls has become the de facto face of survival for an entire generation of young men. He’s a skydiver, an SAS military commando, and he’s summited Mount Everest on multiple occasions. In short, he knows how not to die. Through his Bear Grylls Survival Academy, his hand-picked team of experts impart the same skills on aspiring survivalists. The school is available on four continents though we’d personally opt for Africa. Survival in the Falls takes students on an extensive five-day journey around Zimbabwe’s Victoria Falls. The course culminates in a grueling, 36-hour test of skills including tracking, animal skinning, and crossing some of the continent’s most difficult terrain. Their motto? “It may hurt a little.”

Related: Our Ultimate Father’s Day Guide

#2: Thirsty Swagman’s Round-the-World Pub Tour

No tour company on the planet mixes beer and travel quite like Thirsty Swagman. Their upcoming Round-the-World Pub Tour is an all-inclusive world tour that crosses four continents and promises “zero boring sightseeing”. It all starts in the Australian pubs of Sydney, then crosses to the tiki bars of Hawaii, and onward through Vegas, Reykjavik, Düsseldorf, and Phuket, Thailand. The €6,000 entry fee is a small price to pay for a trip that includes airfare and three- and four-star accommodations. Like many of Swagman’s epic trips, seats are limited and it’s a one-off itinerary guaranteed never to be repeated.

#3: Grand Canyon Rafting

Of course, there are plenty of amazing outdoor adventures right here in North America as well. For something truly epic, Western River Expeditions offers once-in-a-lifetime, bucket list-worthy, seven-day rafting trips through the Grand Canyon. Over the course of a week, you’ll traverse nearly 200 miles and more than 60 rapids in the company’s purpose-built motorized rafts. Additional daily excursions take guests to the area’s most breathtaking scenery, including pristine streams, remote waterfalls, and thousand-year-old Anasazi ruins.

Mike Richard has traveled the world since 2008. He’s kayaked in Antarctica, tracked endangered African wild dogs in South… Read Full Bio

The Art of Doing Nothing in Kyoto

the art of doing nothing in kyoto hanami street

My first trip to Kyoto was an exhausting three-day bender. I rose at 5 a.m. to see the sunrise from Fushimi Inari, spent a small fortune Ubering between temples, and probably snapped a terabyte’s worth of photos of geiko, monks, and monkeys. I departed the ancient city with the nagging feeling that I had simultaneously seen everything and nothing—a regret akin to rushing through a magnificent dinner.

When I returned this past summer with my girlfriend, I kept in mind Kipling’s advice to the traveler: “The first condition for understanding a new country is to smell it.” With the UNESCO sites safely ticked off, I wanted to savor Kyoto slowly. Mornings in coffee shops with a book. Afternoon strolls through Gion to admire art, watches, and antiques. Dinners at out-of-the-way izakaya, perhaps followed by nightcaps at bars recommended by waiters. Like a Heian roué, I would lounge, loiter, and lollygag my way through Kyoto.

Canyon de Chelly: A Beautiful Place With a Powerful and Tragic History

Peter Horan

From the rim of Canyon de Chelly, the view is almost impossibly beautiful. Sheer red sandstone walls plunge hundreds of feet toward a green ribbon of cottonwood trees and cultivated fields. Ancient stone dwellings cling to narrow ledges high above the canyon floor. It’s the sort of landscape that makes you reach for your camera before you’ve even begun to understand what you’re looking at.

But Canyon de Chelly is much more than another spectacular Southwestern landscape. People have lived here for nearly 5,000 years, and unlike most of the great archaeological sites of the Southwest, this is still a place where families live, farm, and maintain deep connections to their ancestral homeland. It’s also the setting for one of the most tragic chapters in American history.

I tried FlipSide’s luggage: its clever compartments changed the way I organize my trips

A set of three FlipSide luggage travel bags

Organizing items in your suitcase or backpack should be a one-time thing, but that’s rarely true. Even if you save space by rolling your clothes and arrange your gear in a Tetris-like formation, things seem to explode the second you land at your destination and unzip your bag. Even worse, dirty laundry and souvenirs make you rethink your whole packing strategy, and staying at multiple properties means that you’ll have to do it over and over again. Thankfully, the FlipSide luggage suite tackles this issue—but did it really make packing easier for me?

I’ve spent much of 2026 testing three of the brand’s bags, including the 22-inch Ryan Carry-On, 26-inch Ryan Checked Bag, and the FlipSide Backpack. And I’m delighted to share that in a world of premium bags to choose from, these actually made a difference. This is largely due to one design element that both improved and simplified my packing experience — a zippered divider that let me split each bag into two distinct packing areas.