When I first got the space bug as a young man (was going to be an astronaut like many of my peers) I realized that if you ran around the equator fast enough you could put yourself "in orbit" at ground level. There is an orbital velocity where your angular momentum is in balance as Galileo figured out.

Of course you burn up because you are moving so fast. But imagine that you put a big tube around the planet and pulled a vacuum in that tube. Then you could be in orbit just off the ground, how fun would that be?

Just as impractical as this idea however as you'd have to hold the vacuum in a very very long tube.