Gremma's Travels: Up up and Away - Hot Air Ballooning in Baden Baden

Monday, 8 September 2014

Up up and Away - Hot Air Ballooning in Baden Baden

Rolling out the balloon

Filling the balloon

Making sure everything lines up nicely

Adding the hot air

Although the early morning wake up was a bit of a shock to the system, the hot air ballooning was amazing! We started with your typical safety briefing, which was a lot briefer than it would be in NZ or Australia. It mainly consisted of "do what you are told, and when we land, crouch down and hold on"! Or maybe we just missed some stuff in the German translation...

It was pretty amazing getting the ballon set up and taking off. The balloon was massive! They filled it with air from a really noisy heavy duty fan, and while that was happening there was a guy inside getting all the lines etc sorted, and he looked so small in there.

Once up it was surreal. So high! And then all of a sudden we'd be falling downwards. At one stage the guy said we were going down at 2.5m per second! Looking at the ground, it felt like someone was zooming in the camera, as everything just seemed to get bigger and closer. And then the opposite as we went up again. It was quite noisy when he put the hot air into the balloon, and you could feel the heat on the top of your head.

We "flew" over some small town and everyone was looking up and waving. It's crazy how high the sound carries. We could easily hear their exclamations, and the dogs barking. The pilot even yelled a couple of hellos to people he recognised.

I was a bit worried at times about how much control the pilot had over where we were going, and at what altitude. Although he may not have had much sway over the wind direction, I think he had a lot more control than we realised. We went down really low over some corn fields, until we were just brushing the tops of them, and I picked a piece of the corn plant. He also had a whole heap of ropes he could pull on to change the shape of the balloon and maybe that had some impact over direction, though not too sure.

The views were pretty damn good of the countryside, and the black forest. Unfortunately it was a little cloudy, but even so the views were spectacular.

After a couple of hours we landed in this tiny strip of grass on the side of the road. The van and trailer were across the road, so we got a couple of helping hands and he put just enough air in the balloon to lift us off the ground. Someone went and stopped the traffic (which there was a lot of), and the helping hands pushed us across the road. One guy in his car looked absolutely astounded, and I can just imagine his stories when he got into work that morning!

All in all it was a wonderful experience. Would have been nicer if it was a little clearer and there was more wind so we could travel a bit further, but even so it was amazing and would definitely do it again, especially if someone would guarantee the weather!