Just a bunch of hot air — Lung Story Short...

If you’ve never seen hot air balloons in person then I highly suggest you do. They’re amazing and magical and I love them. This will be the third time I've gone to see hot air balloons somewhere. One festival that is on my radar for my bucket list is the Albuquerque hot air balloon festival in New Mexico! I don't know if I'll be well enough to go to it this year in October. If not, then next year it is!

I was pretty excited to get the chance to go to the one in Frederick, CO, twice. Once at daybreak and the other at sunset. Friday morning, Dennis and I got up at 4am to get ready to leave by 5am (uh sleepy kittens). We hit some traffic caused by an accident that completely shut down the exit ramp on 225 to 70. We found our way eventually and were only 30 minutes behind schedule; there were only four balloons in the air once we got there. The weather was perfect, warm, sunny, and a few clouds in the sky. The field was a bit moist from some previous rain which made me rethink my choice of footwear temporarily but then the balloons inflating everywhere distracted me. All the balloons were pretty colorful, two of them were shapes. There was a penguin with sunglasses holding a camera and then there was a Humpty Dumpty (sat on a wall...).

After we left we went to go get some breakfast since it was only a little after 7, therefore there would still be traffic on the highway. On our way to find a place we could see the balloons in a distance, headed towards the mountains. I tried to get a good picture but they were pretty far away. Once we were done with breakfast we decided to keep the adventure going since it was still early and Dennis had the day off. We decided to go to Lookout Point off of 70 near Golden. Neither of us had been there so we had no idea what was there. The route took us up through a road with some sweet houses that definitely have stellar view. We ended up at a cool looking visitor center, near some mansion you can take tours of and have weddings at (I'm saving that to go with Laima). Continuing on the road we stopped in at Buffalo Bills grave site and museum, no we did not go in. There was an area with a nice look out point that you could see quite far, Denver looked tiny! When we left we took Lariat Loop down to Golden, which consisted of many switchbacks and crazy bicyclists.

Sweet vantage point Dennis got a pic from

Balloons at sunset are different from the daytime. The balloons do not leave the ground. Instead they fill them up and keep them stationary. Since it starts to get dark it looks really cool because the flames shoot into the balloon and make them glow, like glow bugs...maybe not. This time my brother joined Dennis and I at the balloons. Its about 50 minutes from the house. As we got closer we knew parking would be a b**ch! So many damn people! We finally found parking a bit of a ways away. Once we got to the balloon area we found a spot to chill at with my tapestry. I of course sat there the whole time because the day was a slightly tough lung day by the end of it, so I was pretty tired. Paulius went off to go get some cool pictures with his camera; Dennis went to go find food and came back disappointed. Apparently there was only one food vendor and the line was insane, so were the lines for the bathrooms. They only had one porter potty and one small building with two stalls each per gender...(ah hello people you need more bathrooms for this event..!!!). The organizers of the festival clearly were not prepared for this amount of people.

Sitting on a tapestry surrounded by hundreds of humans is hard not to people watch. So many strange annoying children near me, hard shell tacos for sure. One girl decided that when she would run by me she would make it a point to jump over the corner of my blanket and knapsack right in front of me (I was secretly hoping she would trip...) maybe, maybe not. There were just so many children running around yelling and such, but then of course my attention was diverted to all the floofs surrounding me! There was one German Shepard like dog that had a vest on that said training and it had collar that glowed blue. The lady with the dog was training it to sit and stay. There was another floof about 10 feet away in front of me. A fluffy golden that was just chillen, rolling around. I had thoughts about stealing him. Back to the balloons. I noticed it was a tad windy, a bit windier than I think the balloons like to be hanging out in and so some of then started to deflate and go down (sad face). All went down except for three. One of the three was Humpty Dumpty and he eventually went down too, he had a great fall.. haha. Once all the balloons started going down, which was a bit early, wahh bye bye balloons, everyone started packing up and heading to their cars. This was going to be a nightmare leaving. Dennis went ahead to go get the car so it would be easier for me since the walk from the car to the field was a struggle. Paulius and I waited for quite some time for Dennis to finally get to us. The traffic leaving was insane and once we got in the car it was still slothy moving from there to the highway.