Hot Air Balloon

We booked to go on a Virgin hot air balloon, we have had 3 attempts, and this was on fourth on Saturday and we very nearly did it.

After waiting around all day at home, we eventually left at 4:15 to travel about 45mins away to Knutsford. TomTom, got us their no problem.

When we arrived my Auntie Doe asked if we had out Tickets and yes we had forgotten them.

So 10 minutes later, after I stopped laughing, my Uncle John arrived with all the required paperwork, there were 17 of us in all.

The guy from Virgin arrived with the paperwork and it seemed as we didn’t require our tickets any how.

So we were then taken to the launch site and there was the Balloon siting their waiting to be inflated.

We had to wait a further 30mins or so, until they decided that it was not to windy and we could go up, so the inflection began…

Yes that’s me holding up the mouth of the Balloon to allow the air from the fans to get into the Balloon, it didn’t take that long to inflate it, around 20mins. It was huge, much bigger than I thought it would of been.

So the next step was them getting some hot air into it. Which that starting doing, just before they started doing this, four people had to get into the basket to help weigh it down, so they all jumped in.

Shortly after this, the rest of us were told to jump in or board! Which we did.

What followed next was 10 minutes of entertainment, as the pilot tried to get enough hot air into the balloon, we were all told to sit, which we all did, but the Balloon was getting push to one site, as you can see the basket above is tilted a great deal, it did worse than this while we were in it! Very funny!

Unfortunately the pilot decided that it wasn’t going to take off and called the flight off… hope fully next time we will get to go up!

You can see all the images from the evening here.