Balloon Ride

Three and a half years ago, Nicole bought me a hot air balloon ride as a birthday gift. The certificate was good for a number of participating balloon ride places across the country (I had no idea but there are actually quite a few). Between the engagement, the wedding and the honeymoon, we did not have time to schedule the ride, especially since the nearest one is about an hour away (you can't go floating over Manhattan, unsurprisingly, so most of them are in rural areas), and it is weather dependent (very dependent--we had tried to schedule several other times previously but they cancelled due to wind or rain).

Well, this past weekend our time finally came. Except that we weren't prepared because after being cancelled on three times last week due to weather, and seeing that the wind was going to be ~7 mph (borderline), we assumed it was going to be another no-go. You can imagine our surprise when we got the instruction 2.5 hours prior to take-off to get our butts out to Clinton, NJ, which is about an hour west of Hoboken. Despite some confusion with daylight savings time and Zipcar, we drove out to Clinton in time for our 3 PM balloon departure. We were greeted by Tom, the owner of American Balloon. We were also greeted by Tom's assistants, Tom and Tom. No, that is not a typo. They all were named Tom. One of the Toms said that he wanted to hurry up because he had a bottle of Jack Daniels waiting for him. That is also not a joke.

After the Toms inflated the balloon, we quickly jumped inside the basket along with another man and couple and Tom, er the first Tom. We floated a few hundred feet off the ground, and Tom was able to control the altitude of the balloon with the propane gas. I asked Tom how he steers the thing, and his reply was....you don't. Basically, you can go up or down, but that's about it. Everything else is where the wind blows you. Grrreat!

The sun peeked out just as we took off, and made for some amazing views. We floated close enough to people's homes to see in their windows. We saw deer in the forests, mountains in the distance, even other ballooners from other locations. Pilot Tom maintained cell phone contact with the other two Toms who followed us in a truck on the ground, along with one of the other passenger's wife.

At one point, a police car pulled into the driveway of a farm house we had just floated over. Tom said, "I don't think they're after us." He said this without joking. Which is odd when you think about it, because unless he had a guilty conscience why would that thought even cross his lips.

After about an hour, Tom said that we had to "look for a spot to land". This apparently meant anywhere. In the past, Tom has landed in a soccer field, someone's back yard, a prison, a corn field and the police station parking lot two towns over. I am not making this up. You land the balloon wherever you can, as long as it's open space. So this time, after missing some "opportunities", Tom decided to land off the cul-de-sac of a development that was still under construction.

We dropped down, slowly, slowly and aimed for a grassy spot off the side of a road. And we touched down for a smooth, perfect landing. Except for skirting by power lines, the highway, hitting two trees and narrowly avoiding the barbed-wire enclosed gas pipe six feet from our touch-down spot. And then dragging for about another 50 yards as the Toms yelled "pull it right"/"let's go left", while Nicole and I hung on for our lives. At this point, the other 2 male passengers hopped out of the balloon to assist with the landing, and were getting thrown all over the place. By the way, Nicole would NOT stop giggling during this whole landing episode. People stopped their cars on the street and ran over to us because they thought we crashed. Seriously, they were staring at us like passengers on Flight 1549. I was half-expecting the Red Cross to show up with blankets.

Suffice it to say, the Toms were finally able to drag the balloon to a side street and deflate it. We landed near an Alpaca farm, so I got the chance to go say hello to a curious Alpaca as well. (Only in rural NJ!) The day ended with the Toms driving us back to our car and giving us some champagne. Congratulations, you didn't impale yourselves!