Up, up, and away!

Saturday, my birthday morning:

Awake ridiculously early, L and I brushed our teeth and sped unshowered in her car to Williamson, Georgia, a rural community (population ~300) about an hour south of the Nunnery (33.179743, -84.362976).

You're aware that recent traveling has been fraught with difficulties (cf. my trip last month) and this deceptively simple excursion was no exception. Several obstacles to smooth travel arose, including a roadblock & detour, a surprising amount of traffic for a Saturday morning at 06:00, and what L referred to as "two-minute traffic lights" of which there were seemingly several dozen, but we did manage to arrive (safe, late) at the HQ of SkyBlue Balloons:


We helped our pilot Kyle, his wife Janet, and two friends inflate our balloon...


and then we floated off into the sweetest blue yonder.


It was quiet except for the white-noise of the flame as it was released into the balloon, the crackle from Kyle's two-way radio, and all of our oohs and OMGs as we processed the reality of our situation...


We flew fairly low, at maybe 150-200 feet, just high enough to sail above treetops:


There was much beauty.

We soared above neighborhoods and fields, above dense woods and roads - all without getting tangled up in powerlines, which is apparently something that happens. People would look up and wave at us and we would smile and wave back. Good times.

There was a particularly gorgeous man-made pond:


Here's a picture looking up at the inside of the balloon. I think I've converted (um, corrupted?) L because she's mentioned several times now how this reminds her of the part in Solaris when the Athena is docking with Prometheus. Heh. Awesome...


And here's the view looking down:


After an hour of blissful buoyancy... we landed at Ingles! Hooray! Ingles! Or more properly, we landed in a small field of bush and bramble next to Ingles.


Kyle and Janet put us to work deflating the balloon, folding it, and packing it into the trailer hitched to the van which had tracked and followed us via the magic of GPS and met us, yes it's true, at Ingles.

Our timing couldn't have been better - not five minutes into the ride back to L's car, it began to rain...


There was much celebration.

Apparently there is a ballooning tradition which involves champagne, but this conflicted with my own personal tradition of not drinking alcohol at 08:00 on my birthday (or any other day). So L convinced Janet (not without encountering resistance, I've been told) to allow us to drink sparkling grape juice from champagne flutes:


Sabitathica's official assesstimate: A fine way to spend the morning of your thirty-somethingth birthday... five stars.