Hot air balloon festival

This Friday we went to see the hot air balloons at the Glass City Balloon Race.

They have a whole weekend of events and it just gets more popular every year. This year they moved to a new location with better parking and a shuttle bus route.

The picture you see here was from the Friday evening flight. It's not actually part of the competition. It's just meant to be something fun for the crowd to watch.

The actual competition takes place the mornings of Saturday and Sunday. It is really more of an accuracy competition than a race.

Basically a target is setup in the field and the various teams have to assess the weather, find a suitable launch location, launch their balloon, and hopefully toss a marker as close to the target as possible. Sounds easy but it is not.

Now I did watch the competition last year. It all the balloons I think only 3 got anywhere near the target. When you think about the fact that a balloon cannot steer and can only go up and down then you realize how hard this task really is. Combine that factor with limited launch areas for the teams and unpredictable variations in wind and the achievement becomes quite impressive.

Maybe one day I will have the chance to ride in a hot air balloon. It looks like a fun experience.

In this picture one balloon is getting close to launch and others are just starting to get inflated.