Balloons Over Anderson 2009

Five people and a lot of volunteers really wanted to bring back a ballooning festival to Anderson, SC this year.  They worked hard to produce the first Balloons Over Anderson festival this past weekend.  I went on Saturday morning, Saturday night, and at sunrise on Sunday morning.  From my perspective, the festival turned out great.

In addition to a good turnout of balloons, we saw skydivers, and large scale model airplanes.

Saturday morning we noticed tethered rides in a balloon being offered and the line only had five people.

Randy and I paid and got in line.  As our turn was approaching, I started getting nervous.  I looked back at Cari to see if she would switch with me.  I had never been up in a wicker basket attached to a flame thrower attached to a large fabric envelope.  I was unable to get her attention before one of the workers was giving me instruction.  He told me as soon as the basket hit the ground, I needed to jump on because he would need my weight to help hold it down.  With no time for fear, I was in the basket.

Once we ascended, I realized how incredible it was.  It was such a gentle ride and my fear left me very quickly.  That's when we hit the full length of the tether at around 130 ft in the air. The basket jolted to the side a bit but nobody got kicked overboard. We continued floating in place for a few minutes before the balloon slowly drifted back down.

It was really awesome.  As soon as we got down, I begged Cari to go try.  She wasn't excited about it, but she went and Randy got his second ride.  Cari can be seen in this photo wearing the blue sweater:

Saturday night, Cari and I went back to see the balloons glow in the dark.  If you have never seen what I'm talking about, here's a video I made with my new Motorola Droid:

The final launch of the event was going to come on Sunday morning at sunrise, otherwise known as seven in the morning.  It's a thirty minute ride out there from the house and I wanted to have plenty of time to see the setup so I left my house at six.

I found myself in the middle of the launch field taking what would turn out to be 260 photos.  I was surrounded by balloons and it was really amazing.  Here's another video, again made with the Droid.

As I go through some more of my photos this week, I'll get some more ready to post toward the end of the week.

It's amazing what five people and their volunteers can put together.  I hope their efforts were well rewarded this weekend so they can start planning for next years event.