By Joe Berk
The turnaround point for our New Mexico trip was the Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta. We had talked about it for years, and it combined nicely with our stops in Tucson and Alamogordo (and the visit to Tinfiny Ranch). I shot all the photos in this blog with my iPhone. I had the big Nikon D810 and its boat anchor 24-120 lens with me, but my leg was acting up (an old motorcycle accident injury) and I couldn’t lug that thing around any longer on this trip. I might have shot better photos with the Nikon, or I might not have shot any at all if I didn’t have my cell phone. Adapt, improvise, overcome.
The deal on our visit to the Balloon Fiesta was a tour group. It’s really the only practical way to get in to see the balloons. Here’s the deal: Albuquerque’s population is 550,000 people (it’s the biggest city in New Mexico). The Balloon Fiesta, however, draws a cool one million visitors. Just getting to the field where the balloons lift off would take an hour or more due to the crush, and if you did that, you’d have to park far away to find a parking spot. If you’re part of a tour group, however, you ride on the tour group’s buses from your hotel to the balloon field, and they take you right up to the gate. The City of Albuquerque has done this event for years and they have it dialed. They designate special bus lanes during Balloon Fiesta week. Logistically, it’s a much better approach.
What the City can’t control is the weather, and hot air balloons are sensitive to the weather. If there are electrical storms, low visibility, rain, or high winds, the balloon’s won’t lift off. And there were plenty of all these conditions that week. Our tour grip told us we’d be making three trips to the balloon field, but there were no guarantees we’d get to see the balloons lift off during any of our visits. Two of our visits were early morning affairs (we arrived at the field before sunup), and another one was in the late afternoon.
During our first early morning arrival, it was cold and too windy for the balloons to lift off. The balloon fiesta had a backup plan, though, and in the distant skie we observed a light display. At first I thought there was a large board with lights, but then the display lifted into the pre-dawn sky. I learned it was all down with multiple computer-controlled drones. That was impressive.
The images changed. We couldn’t see or hear the drones, and there was nothing from our location that would indicate they were drones. It was impressive.
During our second visit, which occurred in the afternoon, the wind conditions weren’t acceptable and there was a thunderstorm moving in, which prevented the balloons from ascending. But it allowed a parachute display, and I grabbed a few photos of it.
Evidently the smoke generators the parachutists used create debris. One particle hit me in the face. Fortunately, it caught me in the cheek and not in my eye. That would have made for an interesting lawsuit.
Even though it was too risky for the balloons to inflate and ascend, there was a lot going on. It was fun walking around and taking iPhone pictures.
Our third and last visit to the balloon fiesta field was on a brisk Sunday morning and it was the charm. After being skunked on two prior visits, the word was out: The balloons had the okay to inflate and liftoff. The winds were suitably low, visibility was good, and there were no looming electrical storms. It was a go for a mass ascension, which kind of sounds like a religious experience. In a way, it almost was.
In a strange kind of way, being in the middle of the mass ascension kind of reminded me of seeing the whales in Baja. You go out in a small boat and for a while, nothing happens. Then you see a lone whale spout in the distance (like that one balloon you see going up in the photo above). Then, suddenly, there are whales spouting all around you, and then they are right up close to the boat. The balloon fiesta is a lot like that. Nothing happens at first, then you get very excited when you see that single first balloon ascend. Then, suddenly, balloons are going up all around you.
A question several of my friends asked is: Did we go up in a balloon? The answer to that is no. You have to make a reservation far in advance to get a seat in one of the balloons (we had not), it costs several hundred dollars, and truth be told, I wasn’t too sure about doing it. Joe Gresh, whom we visited on our trek to Albuquerque, had done it in the past and he told us he and Colleen enjoyed it. Maybe next time.
If you have any thoughts about visiting the Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta, my advice is to go for it, and to do it through a tour agency for the reasons listed above. It’s a bucket list sort of thing to do. We went with the Road Scholars tour group, they did a great job for us, and they kept us busy for the three days we were in Albuquerque.
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