Albuquerque (October 1998)

I'd bought an SLR camera for the 1996 New England Tour, and this was before digital cameras when you still had to buy film. I took 6 rolls with me but I ended using 15--in one weekend! One package I bought included a pin badge for the balloon fiesta, which I stuck on my camera bag. That little freebie lead to me to buying dozens of pin badges from everywhere I went and covering my camera bag! 

I told a friend I wanted to go to the Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta and she said she'd always dreamed about going to New Mexico on her birthday which, it turned out, was October 2nd, the day before the Balloon Fiesta. It seemed like fate so I booked plane tickets, a hotel, dinner reservations, and a balloon ride (against my better judgement) for three of us.

I changed jobs right about that point and they sent me to two weeks of orientation in Boston, followed by a week of training in San Francisco. The Friday I returned from San Francisco was the Friday we were leaving for Albuquerque. No problem: The class ended at 2, I could get a flight at 4, I would be home at 5, and the Albuquerque flight was at 8. What could go wrong?

On Tuesday, Dawn called me: Our friend couldn't go. We went over the list of people we might want to spend a weekend with, and then decided to try and cancel the extra seat. Fortunately it wasn't a problem for the airline or the balloon flight (who admitted he was overbooked anyway).

On Friday I got to the airport to find my flight to LA was delayed by an hour. I tried to get on stand-by for an earlier flight, but no luck there. Fortunately I was able to catch Dawn and rearrange the schedule: Instead of picking me up on her way home from work, she would go home and pack, then pick me up at terminal 7 and drive to terminal 1. (LAX is a nightmare.)

Dawn got to terminal 7 and found my luggage, but not me. It turned out my flight was delayed another 30 minutes, but my luggage had taken the earlier flight.

I finally landed, we drove around the airport a few times before finding short-term parking, checked in about 10 minutes to spare. We were ying Southwest Air and they don't assign seats; instead, you board according to the order you check in, and since we were the last to arrive, the only seats available were the ones next to sumo wrestlers and screaming babies.

We arrived in Albuquerque and I went to the car rental desk, who said they'd never heard of me. While I went through our luggage trying to find the confirmation number, Dawn checked with all of the other rental agencies, and discovered that I'd made and cancelled reservations with all of them. She found out something about me that day that I would have preferred she never knew. I finally found the reservation number and the clerk pulled up my record.

The clerk was really nice; he even offered to give us directions to our hotel. This forced me to admit that I didn't know where the hotel was. After he finished laughing at me, he got their address from the phone book and gave us directions. I found most people in Albuquerque were very friendly; I think I could get used to being treated like a human being. The clerk also recommended that we get to the balloon park around 5am to beat the traffic.

We got to our hotel around midnight (Albuquerque is very small and very well laid out on a strict grid, so I only got lost twice) and I set the alarm for 4am. Needless to say, we blew that off. (The alarm clock was across the room so I had to get out of bed in the freezing cold, walk across the room to hit the snooze button, and then get back in bed. I did that four times.) We finally got on the road around 6am, both tired and hungry and grouchy. We followed the traffic until we came to an absolute dead standstill. After 15 minutes we'd moved about 30 feet. Normally, I'd be a screaming maniac at that point, but that morning I was captivated by the "Dawn Patrol." About half a dozen balloons had gone up in the dark, presumably to test the weather. You couldn't see them until they "fired off" (or whatever the correct terminology is) and then they would glow like little light bulbs in the sky. Dawn said they looked like fireflies.

I finally got off the freeway, only to find the surface streets were *much* worse. I parked at a nearby Burger King and Dawn and I hiked about 3 miles to the park. We got there just before 7am, which was when the "mass ascension" was supposed to occur. We watched a few balloons set up, which was pretty interesting: They used a large industrial fan to fill the balloon with air, then they fired the propane to heat the air and cause the balloon to rise. The entire process took only 10-15 minutes, which was amazing considering many of the balloons were over 100 feet tall. There were dozens of balloons and they started taking off one after the other. I was actually a little disappointed because I thought they were all going to take off at once.

However, more balloons filled up and lifted off, and then more, and then more after that! Everywhere we looked, balloons were setting up, and wave after wave of balloons lifted off. Before long there were hundreds of balloons in the sky! It was absolutely magical. If you haven't gone, go--it's an awe-inspiring moments that just makes you deliriously happy.

Most of the balloons were the standard, uh, balloon shape, but there were some wild ones--Pepsi and Mountain Dew in can-shaped balloons, J&B and Early Times in bottle-shaped forms, the Canadian flag in both a box and a maple-leaf shape, a daisy, Mrs. Butterworth, bears, pigs, ducks, a huge cow, and--my favorite--a Canadian mountie, complete with horse! Dawn and I went through 9 rolls of film in an hour and a half. (They estimated that 25 million pictures would be taken during the 10 days of the fiesta--Kodak even had vendors selling rolls of film on the field!)

The balloons just rode the currents back and forth over the city--in fact, that's why the balloon fiesta is held in Albuquerque in October. The winds are usually just right to create a "box" over the city and you can steer the balloon just by changing your altitude. We got to watch some of the balloons land, but most landed outside of the park. (An announcer warned people to get out of the way of a balloon landing because they have the inertia of a two-ton truck.)

Everything was just about finished and I glanced at my watch--it was only 10:30am! We drove to Santa Fe, hit three museums, browsed innumerable stores, and ate dinner. It was not a memorable city, and certainly did not live up to my expectations as an artist's mecca. It certainly had its share of "Santa Fe style" buildings, but they were mixed in and around regular buildings, so on the whole it was pretty uninspiring.

While listening to the radio, we heard an announcement that Badfinger (the 60's band) was playing at Camel Rock, which was an Indian casino just north of Santa Fe. This didn't interest me in the slightest until they mentioned the concert was free, and we went right after dinner. Unfortunately, we soon found out that Badfinger wasn't playing until 10pm (or whenever bingo finished). Since we had to get up at 4am for the balloon ride, we decided to pass.

We woke up at 4:50am (the alarm had been going off since 4:00) and got to the launch site by 6. The morning was cold but calm and we were really getting psyched for the flight. At 6:30, the owner came out and commented on how beautiful the morning was...and that he was canceling the flight. Apparently the winds off the Sandia mountains were gusting at 35mph.

I think Dawn burst into tears. I did a little back-of-the-envelope calculation and realized that he was walking away from about $22,000 dollars for about 4 hours worth of work, so I knew he was pretty serious. (He commented that one balloon cost between $65,000 and $210,000 so risking it for one flight was not in his best interest.) If anyone was paying attention to the news, the next day a balloon did crash and one person was killed. (Not from this outfit, I might add.)

I wasn't terribly upset about the balloon ride--we could always do that somewhere else--but I was upset that the mass ascension and the balloon glow were also cancelled. The balloon glow, which is only held two evenings during the festival, is when the balloons are filled with air and the fire is turned on, but the balloons are sitting on the ground. The pictures look absolutely spectacular, but I guess we'll have to wait until next year to get pictures of our own.

We spent the day in Albuquerque (after a proper breakfast) looking at petroglyphs in the volcanic rubble on the west side of the city, then browsing in shops in Old Town, and finally we took the aerial tram to the top of the Sandia mountains. The tram ride is about 3 miles long, the ascent is nearly 4000', and the vistas are just spectacular. We concluded the day by going back to the balloon park (I was hopeful, but the balloon glow was still cancelled). I also hoped to get some nice sunset pictures, but no such luck. Devastated, I was walking back to the car when we happened to notice the full moon was just rising against the Sandia mountains. It was an awesome sight in the crystal clear skies and I finished off another roll of film.

We are definitely going back next year. We're going to plan earlier, as a lot of hotels book up months in advance; we're going to fly out earlier, so we get a decent night's sleep; we're going to stay at least four days, so if the weather doesn't cooperate one day we won't be stuck; and we're going to bring twice as much film!