Adirondack Balloon Festival!

-

Starting next week (isn't that how all goals start, you put them off until next week?) I will be regularly updating this gem on Thursday afternoons.  In the meantime, I've got a LOT of missed time to make up for.  So perhaps I'll do a summer in review (cop out) or even better, a back to the future to the past which will then allow me to talk about the glorious summer months.

In the mean time, I'm going to recap this past weekend's festivities!  I'd like to say New York (upstate) in the fall is anomaly. It's not.  It's quite similar to the falls in Michigan.  Back in college the fact that a North Carolina autumn could span all the way into December was baffling.  I'd come home to Ann Arbor over fall break and the leaves would mostly be on the ground, wet with almost-freezing rain on top.  In NC, the leaves were barely changing colors yet.  My favorite tournament of the fall season was easily in Boone, NC the last weekend of Oct./early November specifically because of the fall foliage was in full bloom!  Now, I'm trying to soak up all that autumn has to offer seeing as I am back in the Northeastern-ish area (is Michigan really mid-western?  Really?) and I'm afraid I'm going to blink and the leaves will all be gone.


What better way to do that then attending the ADIRONDACK BALLOON FESTIVAL?!?! (The answer is:none.  There is no better way.)  We began our adventure at 4:30 in the morning.  The coffee was pre-set and the gargoyles (Jon) were still hibernating.  We met our friends Will and Leah at a Starbucks and the ridiculousness began.  With some minor google navigating challenges (cutting lines) we were in Glens Falls and parked in no time (2 hours).  The balloons were huge, and overcast skies aside, pretty incredible. Their were 10 "fun shapes" that were encouraged to take off as well, but they mostly did hops around the airport grasslands, not really capable of flying anywhere.  While we kept our feet on the ground the majority of the morning, the balloons were pretty magical.  And as funny as it was to have the curmudgeons along, the boys were really good troopers about getting up so early on a Saturday morning....... Annnnnnnnnnd allowing us to go shopping at the JCrew outlet.


But delicious brunches (yes: brunches) was purchased for them in gratitude for their chipper and upbeat personalities.   Definitely something I would recommend doing if you ever get a chance.  The fact that humans have discovered ways to inflate ridiculously colored nylon in ways to induce flight is pretty awesome.  Next time, I hope to be more stealthy about being a stow-away.






Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

-
  i've got a blog. i had one of these in highschool. i lied. i had one even when i was in college, too. however, this time i've made one because it's easier than just writing. not to mention, i think i might actually use this more. its just easier really. besides, i'm about to leave a place i've known as home for 5 years, i have to have something to show for it. i'm convinced that the male and female species were not actually meant to compliment one another so much as complicate one another's lives. all my life, i've been told that you're supposed to be looking for someone that compliments you. Not in the way where some guy is constantly flattering you, but in a salt and pepper, banana and peanut butter kind of way. however, i don't know where it happened, but i always believed that complimentary things, such as red and green on the color spectrum wheel, while were completely different, always shared some sort of middle ground; i.e. they were dir
Read more

My Attempts at Adulthood

-
PUNC-TU-AL... wait, how does this work? After the first step, every other tip or tid-bit of information I've gathered since trying to make this big transformation has pretty much all muddled together. No one individual observation (rant) is really going to make all that much different on it's own. It's like a Monet painting, looking at it from far away, it's OK, but up close, it's a big old mess. (yes, I stole that from Clueless. And no, that's not very adult-ly admitting that.) So by-and-by, I give you the importance of timeliness and punctuality. This in it self was a weird concept for me in college. Not because I couldn't take care of myself and show up to things on time, I just didn't acknowledge some of the facts that I knew to be true. I'm not talking deep or profound facts. I'm talking like, logistically, there is no way that you can feasibly could get from one side of the campus to the next and still watch the end of this
Read more

Step 1 is Always Acknowledgment

-
I've learned that the first step of actually becoming an adult is actually admitting that it's inevitably happening. I'm not saying giving up on the that "kid at heart" type mentality of getting excited for the small things and believing in the impossible. While that is what Peter Pan, Hook, Wendy-Lady and Tink will lead you to believe, it's really just acknowledging that their are steps and benchmarks that you'll inevitably come across, or in my case stumble upon, that will do nothing but catapult you into the next stage of your life. How you decide to respond to them is what separates the floundering semi-professionals that still get too drunk at happy hour and talk too loudly about their boss's assistant and those that find themselves enjoying the ever changing twenty-somethings and commemorate them as a success. Prepared or not, it's coming and there's not a whole lot you can do to avoid it . So I've decided to embrace it. As a
Read more