Yesterday Paul was the recipient of a fabulous ride in Magic Moments.  He isn’t fond of heights or flying but took another chance and loved his ride.  Stan is our pilot this week and we are helping crew his balloon, Magic Moments.

The Balloon Fiesta is such an awesome experience.  We get up every morning before the sun (or Duke) wake up and head to the field to help inflate the balloon.  I’m not much help as the balloon requires strong arms to remove it from the truck, open the bag, stretch the envelope across the ground and get it full of air before the pilot take lift off.  Then we wait to see where the wind is going to take the balloon and eventually we show up, deflate the balloon, pack it up and head back to the field.  My job is to watch and help drink Champagne once the flight is over!

This one didn’t have the smoothest landing but everyone was cheering so that is a success.

 

Darth Vadar stops by each day just to hang around!

The shapes are lots of fun to watch being inflated; they take an army.

We are camping south of the flight field and many of the balloons fly directly over us and some land way too close!

Todays flight was lots of fun to watch. The pilots had to take off from at least 1 mile from the field, hope to fly over the field and drop a bean bag at a target and then either take off or land outside the competion markers.  Stan flew in, dropped his marker and then landed beyond the field.  When the chase crew arrived (us) the balloon was deflated and we had to quickly remove it because lots of other balloons wanted to use the same flight path!

 

I think they all had the same idea about hitting the mark and landing because they were bunched up hoping to hit the landing field.  Everyone landed safely and the passengers got a great ride.  More champagne!!!

 

 

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 6th, 2015 at 1:20 pm and is filed under New Mexico. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.