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This story appears in our Fall 2026 issue featuring cover star Charli XCX, on newsstands September 28th. Want us to come to your place? Subscribe here to get it delivered to your door.
A t 5,280 feet above the vineyards of Temecula, I was floating in a wicker basket with my pants off, trying to get a little action going. A piece of advice, should you ever find yourself in the same position: Don’t look down.
The basket, roughly five feet square, rocked like a canoe every time I shifted my weight, and every so often the propane burner overhead fired a column of flame into the balloon with a blast of heat I could feel on my leg hair. Four feet away, behind an opaque red curtain, a pilot named Phil had put in earplugs and turned to face the other way, gamely pretending to be somewhere else.
Here’s what I had learned by then: A mile high is not a particularly erotic altitude. That is a bit of an issue when you’re flying in the world’s only Mile-High Club hot-air balloon.
“It’s not so bad up here,” my girlfriend said from the center of the basket. “We’re so high up that I don’t really feel it anymore.” White-knuckling the edge, I disagreed. I was terrified, unaroused, and, I want to be clear, about to have a wonderful time. This was fortunate, because even when you shell out serious cash to join the club, you’ve got only an hour from liftoff to touchdown—so you’d better get moving.
How anyone ends up a mile aloft, on the clock with no boner in sight, takes some explaining. The thrill of aerial coitus has been around as long as flight itself. In the golden age of aviation, one couple crashed their plane when their airborne antics broke a wire; as recently as July 2025, a couple was arrested trying to get off before their JetBlue flight landed in Florida. Technically, no U.S. law specifically prohibits airplane hanky-panky. But the downsides are clear: getting booted off a plane, arrested, placed on a no-fly list, and generally shamed in public, all to hook up in a tiny, gross bathroom.
Thankfully, in 1999, the infinite wisdom of the free market came up with an alternative. Starting at a cost of $1,400, Magical Adventure Balloon Rides in Temecula, California, will take two passengers and a bottle of champagne a mile high. The purveyor of this service is one Denni Barrett—actor, producer, magician, founder of a vegan grocery and bistro, and, in his own email signature, Pilot Denni, the Celebrity Balloonist®. The title isn’t a bit: There are vanishingly few people who are simultaneously eligible to join the Screen Actors Guild and licensed to fly a balloon. “Hence the celebrity,” he said. You can even spot Barrett and his balloon in the raunchy summer comedy Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass, where, he noted, “the balloon got more screen time than I did.”
Booking took some explaining of my own. Additional riders, which I’m not into, run $159 a head, but I still had to sit my saint of a girlfriend down and swear that this wasn’t a prank, that it was for work, and that there was definitely supposed to be a privacy curtain.
“I really thought you were messing with me,” she said. “This sounds exactly like the kind of thing you would make up. But it did seem like a once-in-a-lifetime experience.”
Ninety miles inland of the Santa Monica Pier, Temecula was cattle country until a handful of entrepreneurs bet on wine in the late ’60s. Its bowl-shaped terrain gives it a Mediterranean climate, and the same trapped, windless morning air that helps cultivate the grapes makes the valley one of the country’s busiest ballooning grounds. Ballooning is a crepuscular activity—the air is calm enough to fly only at dawn and dusk, and in Temecula, the topography mandates a.m.
Barrett didn’t arrive in the late ’90s imagining he’d spend his mornings this way. He’d sold multiple tech and healthcare businesses in Orange County and L.A. and headed east to do something romantic, which he decided meant making wine. But winemaking, he said, is surprisingly mundane. It is farming, and it is expensive. Then an off-course pilot landed in his vineyard and offered him a free ride.
“Turns out, flying a balloon was a lot more romantic than making wine,” he said. Barrett sold the vineyard to buy balloons, and he’s been aloft ever since.
Which is how my girlfriend and I ended up in a predawn shuttle van full of strangers, bound for a field where Barrett’s crew was unspooling several stories of nylon across the grass. Conspicuously, I was the only passenger lugging a blanket and pillow. That earned a few curious looks from the other aviators; what really got ’em glaring was that we had an entire basket to ourselves.
Barrett was an affable host, and he covered the safety protocols well—he played “Gangnam Style” on his phone to demonstrate proper knee-bracing technique—and explained that he doesn’t fly every trip himself; ours would instead be piloted by a guy named Phil. What Barrett did not mention was that Phil would spend the entire flight four feet away.
“You won’t even know the pilot’s there,” he assured me. “You might think you’re being flown by a drone.”
Phil pinned two halves of the red curtain to an overhead crossbar, we loaded the champagne, and, with a blast of the burner, the ground let us go. Even for someone not particularly great with heights, the takeoff is worth doing once: The lift is so silky, it feels unnatural, with the hypnic-jerk possibility of a fall never entirely gone. We were headed skyward at 523 feet per minute, according to Phil, and as I moved tensely from the edge of the basket to the center, the whole thing wobbled. That did not help give me an erection.
The other balloons had taken off before us, but we left them below. Ten minutes in, we hit a mile. It was insanely quiet, and we could see clear across the valley, above the clouds of the marine layer. That also did not give me a boner.
Phil, I think, could tell. From the other side of the curtain, he asked if we might want to head back toward the ground. We did not argue. As we sank toward something reasonable, the fear thinned, the champagne did its work, and—as delicately as a man can put such a request to a stranger four feet away—I asked Phil whether he could put in the earplugs. He did.
What happened next stays between me, my girlfriend, and the rolling hills of Temecula. I’ll say only this: 1,600 feet up, five feet of basket turns out to be plenty, if you’re creative.
Somewhere out there is a company that manufactures custom Mile-High Club commemorative pins. Barrett told me so, along with the fact that the experience has drawn thrill-seekers, bucket-listers, and, once, a cadre of friendly nudists.
“I don’t even think they necessarily did anything,” he said. “The group just wanted to be able to fly in the nude.”
Everyone gets a pin and a certificate regardless. So did we; we might even frame it. Neither Barrett nor Phil, however, admits to having joined the club himself. Phil said he never sees or hears a thing up there: “But I can feel it when the basket moves. I won’t comment on the performance.”
I appreciated the discretion. If I’m being honest, we didn’t technically meet the requirements either: A mile is really, really high. But the view from 1,600 feet? That’s the perfect height.