Ballooning over Napa Valley

Once upon a time, I had a balloon ride.  It was in 1985, when they had the first (and last) annual Ottawa Balloon Festival.  Nowadays, they have the annual Gatineau festival but then, I was at a loose end for a few weeks and I volunteered to be ground crew for a balloon pilot.  I have been trying to get back into a balloon ever since.

When my parents found out we were going on this trip, they bought us a balloon ride over the Napa Valley, as they had done it some years before and highly recommended it.  We booked it with Napa Valley Balloons, one of several companies you can find on the internet.  I can’t speak for the other companies but we were very satisfied with ours.  They offered all the usual things and in addition, a photo taken of everyone in the basket, taken with a camera strung on a line attached to the balloon itself.

First however, we had to be at the rendezvous site at 5:30 a.m.  Balloon flights usually take place at about 6 a.m. because that is when the winds are at the lightest.  You want a little wind to push your balloon in some direction or other, but too much is disastrous.  We used the GPS to get us to the meeting point but as we had not yet learned to trust it, we drove past and had to do the dipsy doodle to get back.  Other people were arriving and they had coffee and stuff set up.  I didn’t want to drink too much because there’s no bathroom in a balloon.  They had us sign a waiver which, among other things, exempted the company from even their own negligence.

Now, I knew that we weren’t going to get to ride if we didn’t sign the waiver but I had a contracts prof who instilled in me the joy of reading fine print so I circled the offending word and went to ask about it.  Of course, I was told they have a great safety record and so I signed it, with an editorial “hmm” that I wrote next to the word “negligence”.  That seemed to be okay for them, so we were cool.

We had a brief talk about the ride but not much about safety because really, there’s not much you can do if you are crashing anyway.  Then we were assigned balloons by name (we got “Sun Kissed”) and I was interested that so many people were assigned to one basket.  We had ten passengers and the pilot, a nice young fellow named Gabe.  We were driven to the launch site a few miles away and I was surprised to see they were launching from a small parking lot next to another restaurant.

Everybody has to climb into the basket using some footholes in the side so you have to be fairly able.  They continue to heat the air up inside the balloon and get a little lift from the ground and then the crew pushes the balloon around until it is in a spot that is best for taking off vertically.

And then we had about ninety minutes, soaring over the valley.  We saw vineyards of course, as far as the eye could see.  At one point, we saw a flock of wild turkeys, running across an open area, to hide under some trees.  The pilot said he saw them fairly regularly, along with deer, coyotes and once, even a cougar.  That must have been impressive.

When you are ballooning, you learn that winds blow in different directions at different altitudes.  At 500 feet, they blew us east.  At a thousand feet, we travelled north along the valley.  So the pilot went up and down and then we were carried in various directions so as to see more of the valley.

Since we went aloft at about 6 am, and since the valley is hemmed in by low mountains, we watched the sun rise over the eastern range.  It was beautiful.

After more than an hour, we started to look for a place to land.  The pilot had said that the other balloon companies fly elsewhere in the valley but his company likes to see if they can land on Ridge Road, a private road up on the hillside.  Sure enough, the other two balloons launched that morning with us had landed in fields above the valley floor and we headed down, skimming the tops of trees, looking for a suitable field.  We sure didn’t want to land on crops, especially grapes!  With apparently no problem, our pilot located a grassy patch beside some vines and landed us with hardly a bump.  He kept the balloon inflated and aloft, while the chase team found some tracks to drive in to get as near to the basket possible.  It seemed fairly seamless, although they used two way radios all the time to give each other directions and instructions.  The pilot was clearly in charge and therefore, the responsible person of the team.

While the ground crew packed up the balloon and basket, we got a ride back to the rendezvous point where we had parked our car.  Waiting for us there was a full breakfast and of course, the obligatory sparkling wine, in our case, mixed with orange juice for mimosas.  Everybody, including our fellow passengers, was nice and polite and generous and we would recommend this adventure to anyone.