It's that time of year again! I heart hot air balloons and it's the largest hot air balloon festival in the world going down in New Mexico. Right now! (Oct 6-14). This year we headed out on Friday, the 5th. Picked up our rental car (awesome Prius!) from the Toyota dealership in the morning and it was hard to work for 8 hours knowing where we were headed. Drove all night, really all night! To get to Albuquerque Saturday morning for the party!
I slept off and on during the trip and woke up in Monticello. Asked Tony, is that a temple? Turns out it was. I'd never heard of Monticello, UT before and had no idea they even had a temple. So funny!
Got to the park at 4am and slept in the car for about 30 min while Tony got dressed in warmer clothes and made us hot chocolate. It was so surreal being back here again!
Met up with my friend Judy from AZ and met the 2 guys crewing with her for the next 9 days. Ray from PA and Hubert from the Netherlands I think. Really nice guys! We all went to the pilot briefing where we found out it was going to be too windy for any balloons to go up that morning and possibly the evening too. Sadness! So we hung out, did some shopping and checked out some visitors that landed on the field.
Judy gave me the balloon patch for me to stick on my jacket. Replica of her balloon that we helped her with on Sunday.
There was a wood carving competition , pretty cool but we did not get to see people carving. They had 90 minutes though to make a carving and then they items were raffled off and the donations stayed in the community, for the fire dept or something. It was really cool.
Tony had a Boise State game to watch so I dropped him off at a sports bar and headed to my friend Carli's house to watch some conference and hang out for a bit. We had a great chat, it was really nice seeing her again. The time went too fast and then it was time to meet up with Tony again. He bought me food ( I picked a Caesar salad with chicken ) and since we got hooked up with passes and parking for helping Judy with her balloon, we gave our tickets to the people at the table next to us. In turn , they paid for $10 of our bill. Pretty nice of them!
*The balloon festival has iffy weather so its good to have a backup plan. Since we paid for parking and entrance in and no balloons went up we were able to use our purchased tickets to get in to the park a different time.*
We checked in to the hotel after the game (Boise State won!) and Tony caught up on sleep, we listened to some conference and watched a few of our shows Tony downloaded. I checked for updates on the weather and we decided to head to the field again to see if any balloons would inflate and watch the fireworks.
Part 2 - tomorrow!
1 comment:
You look cold chica! But looks like you had fun! :)
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