This begins while we were still living in El Paso and decided to take a trip to see the balloon show at the Albuquerque International Balloon Festival. We knew that it would be difficult to get a hotel close to the festival because of the crowds that were in town. We decided to get a room in Bernalillo, which was close enough for us to have been directly in the path where many of the balloons were landing. We were able to see many of the balloons land from our hotel windows.
People from over the world attend the festival and bring their own balloons and their teams who help launch their balloons and follow them to retrieve them and load them back onto their trucks.
I had the chance to help when I was watching a team from Sweden and they yelled for me to help in holding down the carriage after landing.
Afterwards, they gave me a cheap medal for providing my help. Being 25% Swede and 37% Scandinavian myself (according to my DNA test), I thought that it was appropriate to lend my genealogical relatives a helping hand.
“Hey, diddle, diddle
The Cat and the fiddle,
The cow jumped over the moon;
The little dog laughed
To see such sport,
And the dish ran away with the spoon”.
By Mother Goose
The Albuquerque International balloon festival is the World’s largest hot air balloon festival and takes place each October when you will see hundreds of balloons in the sky at one time. It is considered to be the most photographed event in the World as it draws a huge international crowd of balloonists and spectators.
Bernalillo is an unusual town to visit and has some interesting sights to see. One of our favorite was the Coronado’s Restaurant (I believe) which serves good food and is known for serving Oatmeal with cinnamon ice cream on top for breakfast. Whichever café it was, it gave our morning a good start.
We took the route from Albuquerque to Santa Fe and saw one of our favorite sights, the Camel Rock formation which is unique but it was closer to the highway years ago. It was probably too close for tourist and they had to fence it in to protect it. It is still clearly visible but you have to struggle more to get a good picture of it.
While we in Santa Fe, we spent some time at one of the parks with statues in it. They have lots of art parts Santa Fe.
We continued to visit the park and have some pictures to show.
After this, we headed back to El Paso and saw some balloons still in the air.