Hot Air Balloon Ride #2

As our hot air balloon took off the sun was just breaking through the morning mist making beautiful sunbeams shoot out across the land.  These pictures don't do it justice but I had to try.

This next picture is looking straight down.  I think they said we got up to 16 mph and 2,000 feet in the air.  When we first went up it was a bit scary.  Just knowing that if I fell out or something happened we would die, we were way too heigh to live through that kind of fall and we didn't have any sort of parachute.  We also watched a video the night before of a hot air balloon that burned up and all the people died except for one person who jumped out early.  So I started to get scared and kind of wanted to just go back down.  But I took a couple breaths and got used to it.  It was totally fine and not scary after about two minutes.  Because we were moving with the wind the 16mph felt really slow.  It barely felt like we were moving at all.  And I also knew that flying in a hot air balloon is much safer than flying in a plane, so I really didn't have anything to worry about.

There were lots of beautiful and huge houses below us.  We were in the air for about an hour and we spent the whole time just enjoying the view and checking out the houses below us.

We had a pretty good view of Seattle.

Mt. Rainier looked different from this perspective.  We usually see it from the other side.

As we went on with our ride the operator kept talking ton a walkie talkie to his partners about where he thought we would land.  We went further than they originally thought but ended up in this big field.  I thought we would go at more of an angle when we went down but we went basically straight down.  It was nice and slow.

Then when we were just a couple feet off the ground we hovered there while the partner came out onto the field and pushed us over to the car.  They are not supposed to drive out onto the filed to pick up the balloon so they push it to the edge before completely landing.

Then they deflated the balloon while we drank juice and everyone else had champagne.  Hot air balloons have a tradition of champagne after flights because they originally had to hang a bottle of champagne underneath their baskets so that farmers knew they were rich people in the balloons and not demons.  I guess the farmers where throwing rocks and pitchforks at them trying to destroy the demons.

We had a great time, it was a perfect anniversary date!