Hot Air Balloons: The Chase

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Part 2 of a Day in the Life of a Hot Air Balloon.

Once the balloon is in the air, we have to go fetch it and bring it back. This is called The Chase.

The Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta is ten days of... more than ten days of balloon related insanity. Slap a "Balloon Chase Team" sign on your car, and you can go anywhere. Orchards, fields, back yards, private land, the Indian reservations. The Native Americans get rather testy about you landing on their land, so we try not to. But other than that...

The Chase 

Our balloon is a bembel, or wine pitcher.



Getting ready to head out.




Waiting for the
moment to leave,
and watching the
balloons stream by.






The launch park looks empty as we head out.






There's joy in watching
the balloons go by.




Balloons headed north,
we're headed south
out of the park.

Why yes, that's a skunk.



Our bembel is to the left,
as we chase balloons.




Crossing over the Rio Grande, still chasing all those balloons.





At the start of the chase,
we're all going in the same direction.




Who's chasing whom?






Since all the balloons are heading in pretty much the
same direction, we all end up chasing each other.








We're getting closer. The bembel's next to the top of the pole.





Airabella came down early.
The balloon's on one side of the road,
the basket on the other.





My first view of Darth was between trees, as the balloon came down in someone's yard. Rather disconcerting.




Wind whipping the flag as we
chase after the bembel.








The bembel isn't a dot any more.



Coming in low,
looking for
a place to land








"Where's The Bembel?"
Hiding behind the house




It looks like
a landing!
Now we need to
find a road.







No, no landing.
The area was
full of corrals.
There's this thing in the sky...


And people just keep on
driving like it's the
most ordinary thing.
Well, during the Balloon
Fiesta, it is.









We caught up with it...
until the wind went one way
and the road another
It's a lovely thing, our bembel.









There she is, waiting on the hill top.







Safely down, ready to deflate, pack and carry home.









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A day in the life of a hot air balloon.

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My second year at the Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta!
(Pics taken on different days.)

I took Amtrak from LA to Albuquerque, arriving Friday, October 1. Up at 4am. Yes, 4am. Showered, caffeinated, dressed, and out the door by 5am. Karen, Kevin and I head for the mess tent, where the pilots and crew get fed breakfast and discuss the weather. Out on the launch field no later than 6:30, to find our spot, and get ready to unpack. The sun isn't up yet, and I'm bouncing around with several hundred other balloon teams, getting ready for the day's excitement. 

The excitement really starts when the first pilot balloon goes up. It's an itty bitty thing, with a bright light on it, launched from the area of the pilots' briefing. We all watch it go up, as it will tell us how the winds blow. Any ground wind and most balloons won't launch. That's why balloons launch at dawn, when the ground winds are calm, before the sun heats everything up and makes for exciting times on the ground.



Small time out to admire the sunrise. One of the benefits of getting up at 0-dark-thirty is getting to watch the dawn.







As the sun comes up, the national anthem is played, and a balloon is launched carrying the American flag. Every day it's a different balloon who has the honor. This day, I caught the Pepsi can, for a friend who's a die-hard Pepsi drinker.


The balloons that launched first on Sunday went up and then south at a good clip.  We were all a bit disappointed, as we weren't going to launch our balloon again. Then someone noticed that HEY! the balloons higher up were coming north again. The winds above a certain height above ground were blowing south, and winds several hundred feet above that were blowing north. Balloon launch time!

The Setup

If you ever want to teach anybody about wind layers, come to a balloon festival. Not one where there are just a few balloons. You need to be able to see what dozens, and in our case, hundreds of balloons do. For example:

On Saturday, the day of the Mass Ascension (everybody who can is supposed to launch), we didn't. Why? All the winds were heading south, and the balloons would come down somewhere in the city of Albuquerque. Probably downtown. I'm crew for a ten-story bembel, or wine pitcher, and there isn't anywhere to land a ten-story anything in downtown Albuquerque. When a balloon lands, it not only lands on its basket, but the balloon must completely deflate. Ten stories of deflated balloon takes up a lot of space.

I know this because inflating a ten-story balloon takes up a lot of space. Because on Sunday, that's what we did.
First the consultations with the referees, also known as "Zebras", for some rather obvious reasons. No one of them wears the same patterns, just like the four-legged zebras.


Unload the basket,
hook up the fuel lines.







Tip the basket over, ready to hook up balloon.





Hook up the balloon
straighten the lines.





Start unfolding!





And unfolding...




And more unfolding.







Sometimes starting inflation
while still unfolding.



We have achieved
Flat Balloon.





The excitement is not in
watching the bembel inflate,
but also seeing the
balloons all around.






Attaching the crown to the body of the balloon.




Crown rope keeps
the ballon from
blowing around.




See those fans?
They really "blow up"
balloons!





Holding open the mouth,
so the air goes in.
She's almost ready for...




Lighin' her up!
Heat the air...




And up she goes!






She's tethered to the back of the truck until everything and everybody is ready for flight.




You can't see the zebra in this shot,
but she's 'way out there
making sure there's no other
balloons above ours.






Now, only people are holding her down.




And she's off!













This is a good idea of the size of the balloon.


I started this with the intent of putting it all one one page. Didn't work. So, this continues on The Chase

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If given the truth...

I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crisis. The great point is to bring them the real facts.
     --- Abraham Lincoln

That's the real key, isn't it? "If given the truth... "

Tomatoes are dangerous to your eardrums

Many long years ago, my family planted tomatoes along the south side of the house, next to the driveway. Fresh tomatoes are absolutely awesome.

Fresh tomato bugs, not so much.

Tomato bugs called to toads, who gathered to feast. And then gathered on the driveway, in the sun. The small problem with this was that my mother was, and still is, irrationally afraid of frogs and toads. Late afternoons were frequently pierced by my mother's "Ax murderer in the shower scream." One can get used to almost anything, and it didn't take long for the family to stop twitching and falling out of chairs when she screamed. (A few years back, I was entertained by my mother in similar fashion. Unfortunately, the immunity had worn off. After peeling myself off the ceiling, I told my brother Roger, likewise peeling, "Damn! I'd forgotten how piercing those were.")

Roger was the designated killer of frogs, being the oldest male in the house that wasn't my stepfather. That, and I wouldn't kill them, but move them out of sight. This didn't work really well, as the little buggers would come out for a repeat performance. Scream would be heard. Roger would sigh, and head out to dispatch the offender. My mother would come into the house, white and shaking.

The busybody lady next door, pardon me, someone who heard the screams and was concerned, called the police. When the officer arrived at our door, he had to deal with my mother's explanation, and the corroboration of two young children. I even offered to go find one and demonstrate. I think my mother's reaction to that may have helped convince the officer there really wasn't an ax murderer in the yard. Only a toad.

My stepfather, in an effort to be sociable, or something, invited a co-worker and his family over for summer afternoon barbecue. Warm afternoon, windows open, breeze blowing gently thru. We thought my mother safely in the kitchen.

We were wrong.

Piercing ax murder in the shower scream. The family just sat there, looking resigned. As the guests slowly peeled themselves off the ceiling, my stepfather said, "Roger, go kill the toad." Roger sighed, got up to deal with the toad. My stepfather started to explain about my mother and toads, just as my mother, white and shaking, came in and attempted the same explanation. It wasn't particularly successful, as the co-worker and his family never came again.

We never grew tomatoes again. It was too hazardous, both to our eardrums and to our reputation in the community.

Zero tolerance? Jury Nullification!

Zero tolerance: applying a law to every possible instance, and applying the maximum amount of force allowed, without regard to circumstances.

Jury nullification: negating the zero tolerance effect by considering circumstances and choosing not to enforce an outrageously applied law.

Too many people I talk to think jury nullification means anarchy.

Two centuries ago, our forebears would have known the precise history and source of almost every one of the limited number of things they ate and owned. They would have been familiar with the pig, the carpenter, the weaver, the loom and the dairymaid. The range of items available for purchase may have grown exponentially since then, but our understanding of their genesis has grown ever more obscure. We are now as imaginatively disconnected from the production and distribution of our goods as we are practically in reach of them, a process of alienation which has stripped us of opportunities for wonder, gratitude and guilt.

  —Alain De Botton, from The Enlightening Bridge Between Art and Work

Amazon.com Fail

Amazon Pulls Macmillan Books Over E-Book Price Disagreement

There is some marvelous commentary over at Making Light, a blog run by Teresa and Patrick Nielsen Hayden. John Scalzi weighs in with some pithy comments (full post):

Amazon apparently forgot that when it moved against Macmillan, it also moved against Macmillan’s authors. Macmillan may be a faceless, soulless baby-consuming corporate entity with no feelings or emotions, but authors have both of those, and are also twitchy neurotic messes who obsess about their sales...

These are the people Amazon pissed off. Which was not smart thing, because as we all know, the salient feature of writers is that they write. And they did, about this, all weekend long.

Boy did they. It's been fun reading.

Add this to
Amazon calls mistake 'embarrassing and ham-fisted', a "computer glitch," Some E-Books Are More Equal Than Others, another computer-listing glitch, and other assorted maladroit, 500-pound gorilla tactics by a book source I will avoid patronizing (they may, someday, have something I absolutely cannot survive without, or they may get a clue; also, saying things like "I will never..." has a tendency to bite back, down the road). Amazon is a great resource. But they are no longer alone on the internet, and others have better pricing. I choose to display my displeasure this way.

For other book-aholics like me, there's Book Mooch, for trading books all over the world, the only cost is the shipper pays postage, my beloved Gutenberg Project, Book View Cafe, for an assortment of ebooks, and Audiobook Town Square, which I confess is owned by a friend.