Well sort of. The start of the Fiesta season in New Zealand began this year with the Wairarapa event this weekend past. Over the past couple of years the event has been run as a long weekend, from a Friday morning liftoff through to Sunday morning flight. This is down from its corporate-sponsored five day event, but it is a much better event for this. A much more relaxed feel to the event, without the need to pay the big-dollar piper makes this a lot more fun than it used to be. The flying is just as serious, but the bs on the ground is much less. Wairarapa turned on its usual mix of weather, from light and shifty on the morning mass ascension to just too much (for us anyway)on the Saturday and Sunday morning. A highlight for me as a crewie was being able to get the balloon landed on the trailer while still inflated on the Friday morning - any morning not having to lift the basket one more time is a good morning. The weird thing was that on the Saturday morning, the dawn wind dropped away, and quite a few balloons did a flight after breakfast - not unheard of, but certainly unusual. We were dealing with a few mechanical gremlins at the time, so left them to the thermals at that time of the morning.
It was great that the event finally got a chance to have a Nightglow after being completely and utterly rained out last year. It was a goodish crowd that gathered (maybe 5000?), and despite a fairly brisk breeze blowing up until sunset, everyone managed to inflate and put on a show. Blowed if I can find any photos of it online tho' (and I was too busy to take any of my own). I was a little backwards and forwards on the event this year - living in Wellington it is just close enough to commute, so I missed the Friday evening flight when I headed home, but I wasn't too disappointed. Even though there hasn't been an awful lot of ballooning so far this year, I am getting the feeling I am a little jaded already. Maybe it is being involved with the organising of Lift Off Levin that is taking its toll, or maybe even the lack of flying that I have done over the last while - being on the ground just ain't as much fun really. Well, Levin is only a couple of days away now, so I may get the funk out of my system. Or maybe it's time to give it a rest for a while. That makes me a little sad to say that, but it has been ten years now, with a fair amount of fun thrown in with the frustrations. The simple fact is that I will not be able to afford to fly myself for some time yet, and until then I think I'm getting a bit long in the tooth to be a crewie. And to be honest, organising events just doesn't quite cut it really. It's a bit like talking about sex instead of, you know...
Ah well, let's get Levin out of the way and see where we go from there.
