Balloon Glow

Here is a picture of the what the front of the truck looks like with the Ranch Hand Grill Guard. We hope we will never have to use it but if we do, we hope our six radiators have a fighting chance.

We had a tremendous amount of rain last night. When we came back to the rig from going through the exhibits/rigs at the fairgrounds, the end of our row was a little mushy. John said he wanted to a avoid that section until it dried out a bit. As the day progressed, we had septic trucks going up and down our row and they badly rutted up the ground. We were standing out talking with our neighbors amazed that The Rally personnel had not closed off that end of the row because of the mushy, rutted ground when one of the septic trucks came around again. Well, don't you know that not only did he nearly get stuck but he rolled up the sod under the front end of his truck. What a mess. The driver then acted like he hadn't done it (oops, too many witnesses). The Rally people got involved, all of the septic truck drivers (4) came to straighten out the sod, a heavy vehicle was used to flattened the sod down, and a stamper was used to compact the sod and dirt. They actually got the mess looking pretty good. To our amazement, once again, they didn't restrict traffic from coming down the row from that direction. Soon, it was getting rutted again. We didn't get any pictures as we were all standing watching the spectacle and no one thought to take pictures.

Rita Coolidge was performing tonight but we opted not to attend as we wanted to see the Balloon Glow that was starting at 8:30 p.m. It was great! We were able to walk right up and around all of the balloons (7). What a beautiful sight they were.

After stretching out the balloons, they then blow warm air into the balloons to get them somewhat heated. Check out the sky in this shot, those round specs in the sky are stars in the sky.

Then they start really putting the heat to the balloons to get them upright. John was amazed at how close the flame gets to the nylon balloon.

The balloons glowed but when the hot air hit them, they truly glowed.
Here is another pretty shot.

Out of the give balloons, only one of them wasn't having hot air being blown up into the balloon. The balloon baskets were all tethered to vehicles to keep them on the ground.

The balloon glow was so beautiful and we were very happy that we got to experience it. If you are in the Albuquerque area the first two weeks of October, you are treated to nightly Balloon Glows and daily lift offs of over 800 balloons of every shape and size. That has to be spectacular sight.