Nothing can ever be normal for me!
About midnight, the phone rang and I was PISSED!
Turns out it was a buddy who I do some graphics work for occasionally. He has a printing business and has done a lot of work for a real estate company recently, mostly BS, but it pays well. He called last night to invite me along on a hot air balloon trip during the early morning hours.
I have talked about this fetish of mine several times here and he also knows of my fascination with the hobby. When he was invited by one of his customers to come along, he first thought of me. I said, "Hell yeah!"
I did not sleep much. I usually wake up between four and five AM, no matter what time I go to bed, but this morning I awoke at three, tried for an hour to get back to sleep, finally gave up and started my coffee. I headed over to the lift area and they had had an accident. It seems the throttle valve had jammed open when he fired it up and we were not ready to lift off, even though the basket was leaving the ground with no one in it.
The owner of the balloon had tried several times to get in, but the flames were too much and this baby was taking off on its own. It is fired up lying on its side and the flames are very small until it starts to inflate. Once the balloon begins to stand up, they usually blast the valve wide open for about five minutes, until it starts to float, then they shut it down to idle. This time, it would not shut down and when he tried to manually operate the lever it started leaking from underneath the valve, spreading fire all around. Think: Challenger footage ...
Fortunately, my buddy and I arrived at the same time and we were able to help hold it down enough for the pilot to get his stakes back into the ground. He always fires it up, all staked down, but in his rush to control the runaway fire he knocked off two mooring lines, leaving only one. Naturally, I'm having second thoughts about going up with this guy.
He got it under control, after just a few minutes, with our help, and we were saying, "NEVERMIND!" However, he said he needed to rest a few minutes and everything is fine, because it will only take a few minutes to replace the engine. "The Engine" is nothing but a huge bottle of propane with a control valve on it and with a little more help, he could have it switched out in a matter of minutes.
We stayed. I am so glad I was able to swallow my gulps, because the ride was really one of the most beautiful experiences I have ever had. I have been to many evening "balloon-glows" where ballooners have just have landed and want to show off to the public, but this was only my second trip up, even though ballooning has been a lifelong desire of mine.
It rained yesterday and mostly cleared up after sunset, so that's the reason for the late night decision to go up this morning. The clouds were still moving in waves as we went up and, even though we were late lifting off, the sun was just shy of the horizon. The early sky was vermilion and pink-orange with dark purple clouds moving above, hiding Venus every few seconds. What an amazing view it was from way up there. He estimated that we topped out at about twenty two hundred feet.
We were up for just over two hours, which is a long ride, according to the "exeprt" with the out of control balloon engine.
It was really, REALLY cool!
