In addition to the nightly rate, there will be a 5.7% room tax, 3.9% food and beverage tax and 15% service charge.

I understanding making a profit, but this is ridiculous.

I agree with Jessie…love the idea, and it’s even during “anniversary week”. (yes, my wife and I went to one of Phil’s talks as a “gift” to each other, years ago…) but this is just too damn expensive.

And, in fact, the price includes gourmet meals, room, fun ranch activities, plus all the science. If you break down any vacation into a price per day, you’ll find this rate is quite reasonable.

VinceRN (21): Preaching is optional. Seriously, this is a science vacation, and that’s the plan we’re sticking with. My talks will be about the night sky we’ll be seeing and other astronomy topics. I have a lot of various interests in life, and after hours or one-on-one I’ll be happy to talk to folks about anything from Doctor Who to my favorite place to get ice cream. But I have no plans, and actually no desire, to use the bully pulpit. It’s a vacation.

As for kids, as my wife wrote in comment 13 above, older kids are welcome. We tried very hard to put together a summer trip as well so younger kids could participate, but we couldn’t make it work out this time. We very much want to make these trips accessible for kids, so we’re working on that for 2013.

Phil, I’ve been looking for a dark sky site for a vacation for nothing but astrophotography from, well, a dark sky site. Would it be appropriate for those of us so inclined to bring our own equipment?

(An aside: Tours often have that one guy or gal who monopolizes the guide’s time with all sorts of off topic or tangential or esoteric questions or discussions. Imagine how much worse that person could be if you are culling specifically nerds for the trip. They’d see even more incentive to show off for the class, as it would be. I hope you have some safeguards in place. Maybe trank guns.)

Do you ever regret that your career path has taken you away from actually doing science into teaching it, publicizing it, dude-ranching it, and the like? After all, you spent at least six years (I’d guess) getting a PhD to become a scientist and here you are blogging about it, speaking about it, but not actually doing it. Don’t get me wrong, what you are doing now is very important and I learn a lot from it. But I can’t help comparing it to my last job as an engineer where, after a couple of years doing detail design work they made me a “lead”.

That continued for almost 20 years, by the end of which I was pretty much no longer capable of doing the detail work I had loved, especially as I could no longer operate the CAD system. I could, of course, have gone back to it and picked up the CAD system quite quickly, but my “lead” job responsibilities didn’t allow for the time. I like what I did as a lead, don’t get me wrong, but always felt something was missing. I suppose that’s part of the reason I enjoy my sill catapults — I get to do conceptual design, detail design, construction and play with the toys when I’m done.

Anyhow, the TL/DR: Any regrets about the change in career path?

Two questions though:

First, will at least some of the trips planned be family oriented? We love travel, and always try to bring science into any trip we take, but we only do stuff like that with our kids. For our family teaching our kids is usually the main focus of trips.

Second, I hate being preached at, even about things I agree with. With Phil being one of the top athiest evangelists going, will preaching about that topic be a primary focus of the talks? Not that I disagree with anything he says, I just don’t consider being preached at as recreation, and Phil can certainly wax preachy on this topic from time to time.

Going on one of these one day would be way cool.