Adventures on Land and in the Air

Wow, I am a dedicated blogger, aren't I? A year between posts? I am mentally bringing myself to task.

Remember that story in the news a while back about the guy who tied a bunch of balloons to a lawn chair, grabbed his most reliable shotgun, and took off up into the sky for a leisurely day of floating? Well, ever since I heard that story, I have wanted to do a little floating of my own. Sometimes in college when I was tired of doing homework, I'd get on the internet and look at pictures of hot air balloons. Once I read how someone who had ridden in one described the experience as feeling like a little piece of the sky. I wanted to be a little piece of the sky. Last Saturday my little dream came true. I got up at 5:00 in the am, put on my warmest fall clothes, and drove to Park City with Ty for a little open-air floating 3,000 feet above the ground. I am pretty terrified of high places--pretty terrified, like I nearly go into cardiac arrest riding on zip lines fifteen feet above ground--so on the way to Park City, I was rather nervous. We got some snacks at a gas station before meeting the balloon company, and while we were in the parking lot, a big van pulled up with a balloon basket in a trailer in the back. For some reason, it reminded me of Something Wicked This Way Comes and the crazy witch in the hot air balloon at the end. It was still dark outside, and I felt like we were in some kind of twilight zone and they were hauling our coffins right there on the back of the van. It didn't help my nerves.

Here are some of the highlights of the balloon ride:

When we first left the ground, I didn't even know it was happening. I was talking to Ty and taking pictures of the other balloons around us that were inflating. The next thing I knew, we were hovering about five feet above the ground. Then we were five hundred feet and then probably about 2500 feet. It was so gradual and still that I couldn't even feel the motion. Ty said he just felt like we were in a tall building looking down. It was true. It was like getting the view from an airplane but without walls around us, like being a cloud or something. Yes, I learned what it feels like to be a cloud. How poetic.

We floated for a little over an hour, sinking and rising to catch different wind currents, watching our shadow float across red and orange hillsides, and passing over houses, freeways, giant supermarkets, and fields with deer. A lot of cars honked and waved at us, and one nearly-naked man who was apparently not a morning person came out of his house and shook a fist at us for "waking him up." (Don't ask me how a hot air balloon wakes a person up. Another mystery of the universe.) Miles, our "aeronaut," kept us entertained with corny jokes and the science of hot air balloooning. I kept trying to get some horror stories out of him, but he told us he had to save those for after we'd landed. He also told us about the first ballooners, French brothers who in 1783 decided to tie a bunch of silky women's dresses to a wooden platform and put a fire under them. Up they went into the sky and over the faraway farms of other villages. When they landed in some confused farmer's field, the poeple of the town were waiting with pitchforks. Anything that unusual had to come from a dangerous other world or be inspired by the devil, right? Silly people. Soon, the brothers began to take bottles of champagne with them on their flights to hold out as a peace offering when they landed in the next unsuspecting village.

When it was time to go back to the ground, Miles made a landing as smooth as the surface of jello. As we tapped the ground, he handed me a rope and told me to pull it, so I did. The top of the air balloon un-velcroed itself, and the whole thing deflated to the ground. We had fired ourselves up 3,000 feet in the air and slowly fallen down, held up only by velcro. I was glad I hadn't known this before we started.

Overall, the experience was not the action-packed adventure I had prepared my nerves for, but a peaceful, picturesque experience that I enjoyed like I enjoy a swing in the hammock. I can now safely say I would recommend a hot air balloon to even the most squeamish about heights. On the way home from Park City that day, I began to formulate how I could someday become an old woman with long grey hair who owns her own hot air balloon and takes it for Sunday morning rides with her dog and and a good book. That's my new dream.