Some Ballooning At Last!

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.

Top Gear Caravan Airship update

Found it! Go here to view the two parts.

Am I becoming a bit much of an Airship buff?

This one is going on my list for the grand US visit someday. Some stunning photos of a trip with Airship Ventures over the San Francisco Bay Area from Bernard Zee. Check more of them out here.

More Top Gear Madness - Can't Wait!

The lads are at it again, doing what they do best - caravan bashing. And the boys at Lindstrand Balloons have come to help with their next "experiment".


Find more videos like this on Aunty Monkey


Can't wait 'til it's on the box here. Courtesy of the folks at Auntie Monkey.

Coffey and a Wake-up Call

So here it is, Breakfast's McCafe Great Coffey Road Trip on One (as also seen on the Lift Off Levin blog). Sorry about the jitters at the start, but it settles down. It was great to see a balloon taking part in the live crosses towards the end of the segments, but I can't help thinking we may have missed the boat/plane/train here. Earlier on in the programme the medieval market (the other big Levin event) had some kids dressed up in suitable garb and got its name and date in to the proceedings. We turn up on the day with a sodding great balloon, take the presenter for a ride, and still don't get a mention about Lift Off Levin. Methinks it may be an interesting committee meeting on Monday, as I think we needed to get a bit more info to the tele-types. I actually think we have committed the cardinal sin of providing plenty of entertainment without enough information. There are a few highlights for me tho':

• The kid on the right side of the balloon as it takes off has a handful of RJs Liquorice and fires them off and up to his right and very nearly into the burners....
• Paul Henry's comment about ejecting said kids during the flight to gain some lift at some stage...
• Nathan's fine job of trimming the tree on his way out - the camera pans away as it happens, but you can hear the snap and some definite movement of branches at the end of the shot.
  
  

It will be interesting to catch up on how the flight went and the possibility of a return trip for the Breakfast crew in Easter 2010.

Airships from another world (and another blog)

Okay, just one more crazy overseas story...

Ah the weirdness that the Google search results will sometimes throw up:

Bay City News Service
Posted: 10/24/2009 11:04:35 AM PDT
Updated: 10/24/2009 02:35:24 PM PDT

A bicyclist suffered minor injuries this morning when she rode into a line tethering a hot air balloon to the ground in Napa County, a Cal Fire spokesman said.

According to the spokesman from Cal Fire's Napa County unit, the woman encountered the tethering line stretched into the roadway as she was bicycling on Henry Road, at Dealy Lane near the Napa-Sonoma county line.

"She didn't hit the balloon, she hit the tether," the spokesman said. The woman was treated for minor injuries, he said.

Cal Fire did not have information on whether the balloon had just landed in the area. According to the spokesman, hot air balloon companies usually launch farther north and work with air currents. "They come down where they come down," he said.

The California Highway Patrol received word of the incident at about 9:30 a.m. Preliminary reports said the bicyclist injured her ankle and suffered lacerations to the neck, nose and hands, according to CHP Officer John Short.

Possible scenario: Woman riding bicycle along road. Oh, what's that? A balloon? It seems to be coming down. Fascinating. It appears to be falling down in my direction, so I won't take my eyes off it. There appear to be some people crossing the road in my peripheral vision dragging a rope, but I will continue watching this balloon very carefully and intently. Hey Lady! Look out!

Careful with those crown lines out there kids - sometimes crossing a seemingly empty road with it when you are deflating may seem like a good idea, but never underestimate the meandering abilities of the public. I don't think it was a "tether" line for a second. I do get a bit disheartened sometimes reading these things that appear to be second or even third-hand account of "incidents" that somehow pass for local news on third-rate (predominantly American) news websites. I guess there are others involved with special interest hobbies or sports that are equally despairing of the kind of coverage that they get. Ah well, hope the lady on the bike was not badly hurt.