A Balloon Ride

Albuquerque is famous for its annual balloon fiesta the first week in October. It's an event, and like Santa Fe's Zozobra spectacle, locally quirky gatherings that started years ago have become huge mass audience things. 

What began in Albuquerque in 1972 with 13 balloons in the corner of a mall parking lot has now become an international hot air ballooning festival with 1,000 entries, sponsored and staged from a permanent 350 acre field. Entries have to be limited now, there is simply not enough space to land more than 1,000 hot air balloons even in wide open New Mexico.

It was initially a balloon race promotion staged by a TV station to celebrate the station's anniversary. It is now the world's largest ballooning festival, and hundreds of thousands of visitors come each October. 

It is streaming online, it's on TV, the traffic and congestion causes gridlock up and down the highway. We have never gone. The crowds daunt us.

Albuquerque is 56 miles from Santa Fe, but with international crowds that big, we get a lot of overflow. People spend a day or two visiting Santa Fe before and after the balloon fiesta. So we get tourist crowds too. Which is good for the city's economy I guess.

This year the opening day was beautiful and sunny but very windy, and the balloons were grounded all day. No one seemed to mind, and everything got aloft the next day and night. 

I've only ever seen the immense Albuquerque spectacle in pictures. But I actually have been up in a hot air balloon.

It was 50 years ago in Connecticut. I was 26. A friend and I heard about a gathering of hot air hobbyists by the river in Farmington one Saturday and we got up at dawn to see about 8 balloons in a grassy field. There were no professionals, no competitive racers, no sponsors or staged events. Just some guys with their hot air balloons drinking beer at 6:30 a.m.

We were young, we were cute (it was summer 1976, hot pants and halter tops, remember?) and soon we were invited into a gondola for a free ride. While the balloon was tethered by a thick rope to the ground and hovering about 20 feet high I was nauseous, air sick at the height perception.

But as soon as the rope was freed and we drifted up I was fine. No visual connection to the ground was the trick.

We sailed and drifted and flirted with the pilot. It was noisy -- the gas jets that intermittently fire to heat the air in the balloon are very loud. Eventually we drifted over a golf course and landed, gently. The champagne came out (it's an old tradition, initiated when fliers landed in French farmers' fields and compensated them for the damage.)

After champagne the chase car found us and we were driven back to the starting field, a little tipsy and a little awestruck by the wonders of floating in a tiny basket so high up. 

The memory of that is perhaps the real reason I've never gone to Albuquerque's balloon fiesta. There is no comparison with that sweet early morning ride 50 years ago and the immense televised, streaming, internationally advertised, crowded and wildly staged extravaganza that is the fiesta in Albuquerque each October. I don't want to replace my long ago memory of what a hot air balloon ride could be like.

     >> Facebook video of balloon fiesta

But if you come to New Mexico, come the first week in October, you might like to see it.