Our Exciting Hot Air Balloon Ride.. (well, sort of ride...)

So, Have i got a story for you all. (I will add pictures later, if MH will attach his camera.. my camera wire is @ home...)

So, In May 2006, Hubs (then BF) decided to propose to me in a hot air balloon (my secret dream actually, which he swears he didn't know!). Well, it didn't work out bc of the winds being to high, so he went with his back up route (which was fine). He paid in advance though, so an extra engagement gift (on top of my beautiful ring) was that I would eventually get to go on a hot air balloon ride (a life long dream of mine).

WELL. We have tried to do this 3x now. Once the weather didnt cooperate and we didnt even bother trying, another time we drove all the way to where the place is, (1.5 hrs from my Dads house) to only arrive to a sudden storm coming up and being unable to lift off.

But yesterday takes the cake.

We got there, and we were the only people on this flight, so that was exciting. Weather is cooperating- but i said to DH- I am holding my breath until we are actually IN THE AIR. Well, apparantly I should have kept holding it.

We helped fill the balloon and got in the basket and got going.. I was so excited we were finally doing this! Yay!! This euphoria lasted for about 5 minutes, when the balloon guy goes to add a little more heat (you don't leave it constantly burning, just a little burst every few minutes) and the burner didn't go. No big deal, I thought, I remembered him putting the lighter thingie in the balloon before we took off. Well he sparks it a few times, and NADA.

SRSLY.

So I am watching the guy, thinking, hmm he looks a little panicked. Then He looks around and he is firmly saying, OK, this is a good spot, we are going down. NOW. It is going to be tooo fast, so hold on. Are you holding on? HOLD ON. Ok but it is a good spot. HOLD ON. (Fortunately this all happened very quickly, so we didn't have time to get scared. In fact, I was kind of thinking, OF COURSE this would happen to us!).

We crash landed into a tree, so we were all fine, except for the balloon. It will definitely be an expensive repair. :( It took us nearly an hour to extract the balloon from the tree (the basket itself eventually settled on the ground, so we got out easily).

The guy has never had all the flames go out and not been able to relight before , that was a first in over 800 flights in 10 years. LUCKY US. Maybe I should go play the lottery? LOL. He told us he was worried that we might break some ankles (glad he didnt say that when we were actually falling!!) So we were actually falling a lot faster than I felt like we were. Fast enough that one of his cousins or something saw us when he was dropping his daughter off @ school and thought, WHOA that ain't right... and stopped and helped us get the balloon off. So I guess we were really falling fast!