Footprints on the Moon

I mentioned briefly in my Self Portrait Sunday post that I actually had interesting things to write about from this past weekend. I didn’t get a chance to blog about it yesterday, but I didn’t want to miss out on sharing with you!
We were sitting at our campsite on Saturday night, cooking hobo dinners on the fire, when we spotted a hot air balloon. I grabbed my camera, and got closer to the fence to snag a picture or two.

You can see 5 different balloons in this picture. There were seven total, but I couldn’t get them all in one picture. We were talking about how my old campfire leader does this hot air balloon league thing, and talking about how it’s something we’d like to do. Not more than 20 minutes go by and we see a hot air balloon, very close, obviously trying to land.

And then we hear the yelling… “You’re going to hit the power lines!” I realize that picture is small, but unless you view it full resolution, you can’t see the power lines anyways. At the time of this picture, they’d just gotten the balloon off of the power lines, which are running just under the colored portions of the balloon. There was lots of popping and hissing, and blue sparks. It was actually pretty scary to watch because we didn’t know if the people in the balloon were okay, or what was going to happen. Someone from the chasing team had to actually reach out and grab the basket of the balloon and pull it away because it kept drifting into the power lines again. The whole campground lost power, and of course everyone had to come and gawk. You couldn’t get back out of where we were if you needed to because there were so many golf carts back there. There had to have been at least 50 people standing around watching.

They folded up the balloon, and the power company came out. They were attempting to stretch the lines back across the highway to reconnect and they kept having to yell at the people who were standing around because they were practically underneath the LIVE power line they were trying to reconnect!! It was pretty eventful for our camping trip, but luckily noone was hurt at all, and they got the power restored in a relatively short amount of time.