Ballooning Over Napa

Planning a trip to Napa Valley and the wine country this spring? Don't forget to book a balloon ride. We took our first balloon ride last fall as part of our honeymoon. It was wild. In a zen sort of way.

Imagine you are high up on a platform overlooking mountains and agricultural fields, maybe a few clouds in the distance but otherwise clear blue skies. Now imagine that the platform you are standing on lifts off the ground and you are floating. The air is perfectly still because you are moving with the wind. The real action is not so much about how fast you are moving forward, but how fast you are moving up and down. Once the balloon fills with hot air (a process that takes a long time and thrilling to watch) it wants to go up -- rapidly. After a while the air in the canopy cools and the balloon drops, also in dramatic fashion. All this vertical movement happens with a slow drift forward with the wind.

We were lucky enough to go when there were 10 balloons in the air at once. It was beautiful to see these filled rainbow colored orbs bobbing up and down as they were heated and cooled by the pilots. As far as extreme sports go, ballooning has to be the most calming.

When the captain is not running the jets, its perfectly quite. However, when the captains turns on the heat, it is hard to talk to the person next to you because it is so loud. They give you ear plugs to keep the noise down.

One of the amazing things about ballooning is how much control the pilot has. Of course the captain can not control the direction that the wind is blowing, but they do control the altitude and this they can do very accurately. An experienced captain can come within inches of the ground and then rapidly rise back up.