Saga Balloon Festival

While Bob was on a plane heading home from Yokosuka I took the kids (except for Tucker) to the Saga Balloon Festival.

I had always wanted to go to a hot air balloon festival but was surprised when I found out there was one about an hour away from our house.  We didn't leave early enough, and had to illegally park at a seven eleven about a mile away and then run to make it in time.  I was truly impressed with how well Calista ran.  Google maps said we had a 40 minute walk but we did it in about 20.  We needed to hurry because they were supposed to deflate the balloons about 30 minutes after we parked.  Luckily we were able to get there quickly and they didn't actually deflate them until much later.  We had plenty of time to check out the balloons.

The orange one was Penelope's favorite.  I thought the octopus was so cute.

We got to walk behind, under, and all around the balloons.  We could even touch them.

They had a couple blimp type things that were low down and they let the kids bounce it above their heads like a gigantic beach ball.

I was not planning on carrying Beatrix.  I'm so happy we had the carrier in the car though.  We would not have made it if she had to walk the mile from the car. 

Leon was really craving one of those liquid yogurts.

The place was not only full of balloons there were tons and tons of vendors.  It reminded me of the Puyallup fair.

It was also very crowded.  I don't think I've seen crowds like that since we moved away from Tokyo.

It took us an hour to walk back to the car.  We went much slower and for a while couldn't seem to get on the road we wanted to.  We had to back track a little bit and even climb a fence and go through a construction area, that was clearly fenced off.

The whole experience was pretty neat.  Next year I'd just go about an hour earlier.