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The story below is an excerpt from our Sept./Oct. 2013 issue. For the rest of this story and more like it subscribe today, view our digital edition or download our FREE iOS app!
From Phileas Fogg in “Around the World in 80 Days” to Thaddeus Lowe and the First Battle of Bull Run, hot air balloons inspire our imaginations in ways no other form of transportation can. Come along as we take a ride above the Blue Ridge with Boar’s Head Ballooning.
“Would it be all right to land in your backyard?” our pilot, Rick Behr, shouts across the grass at the squinting figure of a woman standing on her patio, over the sound of four or five hound dogs barking up at our balloon. This question does not indicate an ill-planned rogue landing. It is in fact the apex of a delightful, cloudless-blue-sky hot air balloon ride, drifting just outside Charlottesville, Va. with the best possible view of the Blue Ridge Mountains. With ballooning, landing in a stranger’s yard is just what you do. The woman – and her dogs – don’t really mind.
“That ride was the best you’ll get,” the crew tells me later, glasses of sparkling cider in hand (champagne after a balloon ride is traditional, but it is only 9 a.m., after all). They tell me with satisfaction that we traveled about 14 miles in the hour-long flight and rose at our highest to 3,400 feet above ground level.
My eight fellow balloon riders, around me now at the Boar’s Head Inn lounge, are all marking birthdays and anniversaries with their first hot air balloon rides. Thus the mood is already so celebratory that I suppose we can’t truly appreciate the perfection of our ride, having nothing to compare it to anyway.
But come to think of it, it did take some effort to attain such a smooth-sailing experience. I learn that hot air balloons are very susceptible to weather. Behr is professionally cautious. He goes up only in the mornings, only when the weather is just right, and only when enough other people are going up too. So, not being a part of a group or party, I called Rick each day of the week in hopes of a ride the next morning. “The weather has been mind boggling, how bad it’s been,” he says on the phone. Apparently the East coast’s weather in general is not ideal for ballooning, but I would say the bird’s-eye view of my home state makes it worth the wait…
