Hot Air Balloons
Apr. 26th, 2009 01:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
janradderThis morning the boys asked me a question about hot air balloons and I realized that they'd never actually seen one in real life, which got me to thinking about my home town and hot air balloons.
When I was about ten or eleven, some rich guy in our town bought his very own hot air balloon and he used to fly it around town. The problem was, he had never flown one before so, as we'd ride the bus to school in the morning or coming home in the afternoon, we'd see it flying over head, scraping the tops of all the trees, sometimes hovering just a few feet above the bus. Whether it was because he was afraid to go too high or because he had no idea what he was doing, he never turned the flames up enough and so he'd drift over the center of town, barely missing the steeple on the Congregational Church or people's chimneys. Eventually, he'd get stranded on the roof of the Stop and Shop or he'd get stuck in a tree, and the fire department would have to come and rescue him.
This went on for a couple years -- you'd see the balloon and think, "I wonder where he'll get stuck this time?" Eventually, he disappeared. I often wonder what happened to the guy, if maybe he finally learned to fly the balloon and that's why we never saw him anymore, or if the fire department finally got sick of rescuing him and either told him to knock it off or just left him stranded somewhere, stuck in the uppermost branches of some tree, somewhere in the town.
When I was about ten or eleven, some rich guy in our town bought his very own hot air balloon and he used to fly it around town. The problem was, he had never flown one before so, as we'd ride the bus to school in the morning or coming home in the afternoon, we'd see it flying over head, scraping the tops of all the trees, sometimes hovering just a few feet above the bus. Whether it was because he was afraid to go too high or because he had no idea what he was doing, he never turned the flames up enough and so he'd drift over the center of town, barely missing the steeple on the Congregational Church or people's chimneys. Eventually, he'd get stranded on the roof of the Stop and Shop or he'd get stuck in a tree, and the fire department would have to come and rescue him.
This went on for a couple years -- you'd see the balloon and think, "I wonder where he'll get stuck this time?" Eventually, he disappeared. I often wonder what happened to the guy, if maybe he finally learned to fly the balloon and that's why we never saw him anymore, or if the fire department finally got sick of rescuing him and either told him to knock it off or just left him stranded somewhere, stuck in the uppermost branches of some tree, somewhere in the town.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2009-04-26 08:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-04-27 12:31 am (UTC)I think there was some sort of ballooning club (or something similar) near where I grew up because during the summer, around Southington, CT, you'd sometimes see as many as fifteen balloons in the air and it was a fairly regular occurrence. It was pretty spectacular to see all those balloons in the air at one time. I was thinking of finding a good YouTube clip to show the boys what hot air balloons look like (right now, they're imagining giant latex balloons).
no subject
Date: 2009-04-26 11:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-04-27 12:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-04-27 09:21 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-04-27 02:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-04-28 06:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-04-27 04:16 pm (UTC)