Sunday, September 7, 2008

Balloons and Burn out

Well, 2am comes way to quick when you go to bed at 10pm.

Woke up, got ready, and trekrr and I were on the road by a little after 3am. We headed straight into Reno and ended up getting caught in the traffic routing surrounding the Park. Finally found the right place, paid out $5, and ended up being the 7th car in the lot.

We found a good place to hang out and wait for the Glow Show at 5am. It was a fun time where four balloons all lit up at the same time, twinkled, and then played Dueling Balloons. The cutest was two Bumble Bees who took the turn as the guitar and you could see their pilots were having a lot of fun!

Then it was time for the Dawn Patrol. Every time I go, this is the moment to look for. The music is powerful, the balloons all rise together and they glow brightly in the pre-dawn air. Then they lift off and your surrounded by glowing spheres that slowly drift over to the brightening horizon and regardless of if lit or not present a breathtaking sight.

Afterwards we moved over to the hillside to watch the Mass Ascension, 90 balloons rising and lifting together from the fields. But that was all preceeded by a large American Eagle filling, standing tall, lifting off, and graced by a fantastic flyover of 5 planes, who flew a formation honoring Fallen Soldiers. This was all accompanied by Mike Algers, our local weatherguy, singing a powerful national anthem.

So we watched the full lift-off before heading back to Carson to meet up with b0neZ, kindergeek, BigTruckCrew, and Lil Miss Muffit to head up back to Como Mining District to check on the cache we'd luckily found awhile back. The original coords were way off, by about a quarter mile, but some logic and luck found the FTF for us. Unfortunately, the Como Fire went through shortly after and the area was torched. BTC and company went to find it a few weeks back and found only the charred remains of the penlight that once was in the cache.

Our search yielded the same, the cache was gone. So we explored the area, the numerous test holes and mine shafts - NO, we did not go in, but did toss a few depth test rocks - and found a new place for a cache in a far better location with an AWESOME view. Always better to improve upon a cache that's been essentially abandoned.

Then it was back down the mountain and off to Reno again to check out the Army surplus store that carrys a lot of AirSoft supplies. We looked through the whole store for awhile, before heading off to lunch. However, at this point it was nearing 4pm. Trekrr had managed to get one whopping hour of sleep since 9am Saturday morning. I'd managed to get 4 hours. Needless to say, we were starting to run on fumes. So back home, time to watch more mythbusters, and just crash out until bed time.

4 comments:

Anastácio Soberbo said...

Hello, I like this blog.
Sorry not write more, but my English is not good.
A hug from Portugal

Anonymous said...

Hello Anastácio.

My Portuguese is worse, I promise.

Forgive this translation: Obrigado visitando. Um abraço para trás de Nevada, EUA.

rakethetable said...

That is one amazing event.

Great photos.

rakethetable said...

I think you and http://twoinatent.blogspot.com/ attended the same event. How cool is it to have 2 blogs I read go to the same event.