What an AMAZING holiday weekend we all had. I don’t even know where to start blogging about it all. The last 3 days were pretty much a photographer’s dream come true with all the events and fun things I attended – with friends, family and by myself.
I’ll start with the BIG event for me – I was able to obtain press pass to attend the 2008 Battle Creek Field of Flight Air Show and Balloon Festival. What a perfect day of photography and weather!
I went down to Battle Creek on Saturday – leaving at 4 am so I could get there for the 6:30 am balloon launch. When I arrived, I discovered they did not take off from the Kellogg airport on this morning. Some days they fly out of the airport – some days they fly in to it. Someone on the airport grounds told me he thought they were south of town someplace.
So, I ended up doing an unexpected “chase” of them when I started seeing them rise up on the horizon to the south. As I drove (not having a CLUE where I was headed – I know nothing about Battle Creek!) – I decided to turn down a side street. I saw a “dead end” sign – and thought – “Well – now I’m stuck! What will I do now?”.
But to my absolute DELIGHT… the road dead-ended into a gorgeous lake! I jumped out and started snapping away. The balloons were rising over the lake and the sun was just coming up. One of the homeowners came out and laughed when I told him I had no idea what lake I was on. He told me it was Goguac Lake, and was nice enough to tell me he didn’t mind if I went out on his dock or backyard.
I haven’t even scratched the surface in terms of how many images I shot – but I’m posting a few images here of the of the balloons coming over the lake, and a few others. I wished that more of them had come over the lake itself- they sort of skirted around it (the Post balloon was the only one that actually came OVER the lake itself). How much better could my luck be to turn down an unknown street – and end up in front of a great lake??? Someone was watching out for me there…
Then – I went back to the airshow and caught all sorts of plane photos. Military jets, biplanes, people doing skywriting, etc. I caught some very cool shots.
The icing on the cake was … the media coordinator managed to get me into a balloon flight! Yes – I was able to go up at 6:30 pm and ride for an hour and a half over Battle Creek!
I boarded the Yellow Brick Road piloted by Pat Brouillet of Kankakee, Illinois. We flew north and had a wonderful bird’s eye view of downtown and the Kalamazoo River. I learned a lot about ballooning, and probably asked him more questions than he cared to answer! Pat was very generous in his offer to share the ballooning experience with me. In fact, his whole family participates in the ballooning and were in the chase vehicle below us.
We went up as high as about 3000′ at one point (and mind you – I can’t hardly climb up a ladder for fear of heights!). But it wasn’t scary at all – I never felt fear, not even for a moment. It’s peaceful and serene and you can see so many things that you’d never see from an airplane. I was most amazed by how much you can HEAR while up there – you can hear all sorts of things like ice cream trucks, barking dogs (tons of those!) and people yelling up at you to say hello!
We were with about 30 – 40 other balloons during the launch. Pat was explaining that it isn’t really so much a “race” as I had thought – but rather – the balloonists are attempting to make their way to a large marked X-target on the ground. Once they can get near it, they drop a beanbag marked down onto the “X”, and hope to be the closest to the mark. Sort of a “hole in one” from sky level!
We flew for an hour and a half – it was a very slow ride with very little wind. In fact, I could tell it was going a bit TOO slow for Pat! Everyone was having a hard time reaching the target areas. There’s enough propane in the tanks of his balloon to fly about 2 hours in hot weather (3 hours in cold) and after an hour an a half, we finally reached the target. Once he tried his luck at tossing the beanbag down to the target, it was time to land before running out of fuel!
We tried to come down once in a very “residential” neighborhood (which really surprised me!) and were grazing the treetops (literally) in order to slow the balloon down. But the ground crew couldn’t quite grab the line dropped down in time and there were power lines coming up. So Pat quickly aborted that landing, and chose a baseball field at an elementary school a few blocks away. We were greeted by a lot of smiling neighbors and excited children at touchdown.
A side note – someone earlier in the day told me to snap off a tree branch and bring it back for good luck – but I was a bit too amazed that we were brushing through trees in a wicker basket up in the sky to think about grabbing a branch! I was trying to make sure I didn’t catch one in the face, actually.
It was an experience of a lifetime, really. I came home sun burnt and very tired, but one happy gal! Thank you to the Brouillet family for sharing your sport with me. I also want to thank Patti Mitchell and all the gals in the Festival Media Center who arranged the flight, guarded my camera gear, kept me in bottles of cold water and who even made me a nice ham sandwich! Thank you to Lisa Jensen, editor at Michigan Blue magazine for helping arrange my press pass in such short notice.
And finally, thank you to my family for living without me for a very long day (the boys had a very fun day at the Wabasis Lake beach, so it couldn’t have been too rough…).
See More Photos on Flickr: The Flight and Balloons Over Goguac Lake
