Darren Hitz is 29, an age that makes him a veteran of bachelor parties.
As soon as he graduated from Notre Dame in 1999 and moved to Tampa, he started getting the wedding invitations, and in their wake the calls to attend the bridegrooms’ traditional last hurrah.
The adventures usually are within an hour’s drive from the airport. The company’s owner, Darren Hitz (center) is in the flowered shorts.
Adventure Bachelor Party tours are all outdoor adventures, or ‘male-bonding excursions in the wilderness,’ as the owner explains.
ABP takes care of all the details from lodging, dining, nightlife, ground transportation and the adventure itself. Videos, personalized T-shirts and other mementos can be included.
The problem was that they were no fun at all — the parties, dude, not the weddings.
“We showed up at the airport and we would drink all weekend, and Sunday go home, and we were still feeling bad on Wednesday because of too much intoxication,” he recalls. “My parents would ask me how was so-and-so, and I wouldn’t know because we’d been drinking too much.”
But his friend Mike Fuji’s
wedding in New York changed everything including his view of bachelor parties, and even his profession — not that taking soil samples from landfills as an environmental scientist was not a really good time for a fun guy such as himself.
So Mike broke the news, and Hitz had an idea. “I said let’s go to West Virginia and go white-water rafting. So we picked a location we could all fly into, went rafting, and it went really well.”
So well that Hitz put up a Web site for bachelor trips. It turned out other guys were tired of drinking parties, too, and wanted guy-adventure trips in the great outdoors instead of the traditional indoor debauchery. Last year, Hitz planned four trips, and this year his company, Adventure Bachelor Party, has organized 40 trips, he says.
The company is based in Detroit, where he moved to take an Internet marketing job after his Florida tour of landfills.
Now, he works for bachelors.
Next year, he has 40 trips planned to 30 locations around the country. All are outdoor adventures, or as he calls them “male-bonding excursions in the wilderness” — horseback riding, rafting, mountaineering . . . No strippers.
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