Fog and the Valley

June 28 marked my one-year wedding anniversary. It's amazing to me to think that an entire year has passed since that stormy, memorable day in 2008.

We have yet to print out the wedding pictures, which was kind of endearing before we hit one year and now just sounds kind of sad. We have six weddings to attend in 2009 (three down, three to go) and they're consuming much of our discretionary income, including our picture fund. And you thought planning your own wedding was expensive! Just wait until your friends, who have dispersed to all corners of the country, decide to tie the knot and you're scrounging for plane tickets to Rochester, MN.

Our actual anniversary passed without much fanfare. The weekend was devoted largely to celebrating others. We attended the wedding of Jessie's cousin and the graduation party of her other cousin. I drank so much at the former that I was shot for the latter, and on the anniversary day, once we returned from all the parties for other people, we made a small dinner, popped a movie in ("Zack and Miri Make a Porno"), made love, and fell asleep. Simple and sweet.

Jess, however, had in her heart that we do something special for our first anniversary together, something memorable and worthy of pictures. An idea came after speaking with a co-worker who, for his 30th birthday, had gotten a hot-air balloon ride from his wife down in Charlottesville, VA. Entranced with the idea, I got the name of the company from him - Blue Ridge Balloons - and made arrangements. Our flight was to leave the Boar's Head Inn in Charlottesville at 6 AM on Friday, July 3. All we had to do was be conscious and clothed at 6 AM and meet in the parking lot.

I don't like waking up early, and will take a sunset over a sunrise any day. I especially don't like spending a lot of money on something that *requires* me to wake up early, and ballooning isn't cheap. In fact it's the opposite of cheap. It would have been cheaper to fly 500 miles with US Air than it was to fly 5 miles in a balloon. The journey, when ballooning, is the destination.

I had it in mind to stay at a bed & breakfast the night before, but I couldn't find a room for less than $150, and this month was looking tight enough already thanks to the aforementioned weddings, so we decided to rent a spot at a local KOA and camp out Thursday night. This was a masterful plan with great romantic possibilities, and it would have been effortlessly adorable had the following three things not happened:

1) We arrived at the campsite after sunset.
2) We forgot to bring matches and firewood.
3) We brought nothing soft upon which to sleep.

This all seems comically inevitable in retrospect, us being us. I knew last month, when I bought my first linen shirt for $63 at Macy's, that I had officially become a yuppie in the worst way, although I didn't think that directly translated into bringing all the goodies necessary for hotdogs and s'mores and forgetting to bring anything except the two contacts on the car battery with which to start a fire (let alone something to burn WITH said fire). So we assembled the tent (a wedding present we unwrapped at the campsite) by the parking lights of the Toyota, and then made the 9-mile trek back to town in search of fire.

$18, a BIC lighter, and four Duraflame logs later, we were roasting hot dogs and making s'mores that would curl your toes. Our stomachs full, we sat in silence and watched the fire consume two of the Duraflame logs which, despite their upbeat packaging do not, in fact, light just by burning the wrapper they come in.

Jess laid down a sleeping bag in the tent. I doused the fire. We attempted sleep on the solid ground. A fitful five hours later my cell phone alarm went off and we drooled awake, packed up the tent by the early morning light, and consumed granola bars and a bottle of water on the way to the Boar's Head Inn. It looked like an overgrown English cottage, and I availed myself of the free coffee, served in a room covered in old color prints of Irish Setters and men in polo jackets. Outside, we met our balloon crew, Jim and Liana, who shuttled us in their white pick-up truck to the launch site behind a local elementary school. All of the local balloon companies talk with one another, often launching from the same spot because the more balloons there are in the air, the easier it is to navigate. That being the case, four pick-up trucks with a large wicker basket and brown duffel bag in the bed switched into four-wheel-drive and climbed up a dewy grass hill into the outfield of a small baseball field, their chosen launch site this morning because the wind would carry them southwest of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

The sun barely crested over the valley to the east as Jim lowered the basket off the truck and tipped it on its side, attached the burners, and unfurled the enormous balloon from the duffel bag. It snaked out of the bag like a magician's trick, at least 30 feet long if not longer. Behind us, one of the balloon crews was already "cold-packing" their balloon, inflating it with cold air supplied by a gas-powered fan. The narrow tube on the ground that was their balloon slowly filled with air, taking the familiar light-bulb shape, though on its side it appeared doughy, like a failed soufflé.

Jim put us to work, holding open the mouth of the balloon as he started his own fan and blew cold morning air into the balloon at 60mph. Jess and I, deafened and delighted by the fan, held on for dear life as the fabric slowly took shape. I peered inside the growing rainbow-patterned balloon, and it was like looking into the great hall of some Fairy King, the sun illuminating all the patches of color like a molten piece of stained-glass.

Once the balloon was “cold-packed,” Jim turned the knobs on two large propane tanks in the basket and fired up the burners. “Burners” is really an understatement here – these things shot seven feet of flame up into the hungry mouth of the balloon.


He fired them in short bursts, alternating burners, until at last the hot air pulled the balloon skyward. We quickly jumped into the basket, which had just enough room to fit the three of us. An assistant unlatched a safety tether from the truck, Jim fired both burners, the heat prickling on my scalp (which couldn’t have been more than 8 inches from the burners – yeouch) and the balloon creaked and groaned and slid along the grass for a few feet before lifting magically up over the trees.

We spent the next hour floating serenely 1,000ft over the valley. The sun hadn’t yet burnt off the morning fog, and it hung in pockets over the valley. There were four other balloons in the air with us, all at varying altitudes and distances, and it was amazing to watch how fast they could ascend and descend.


For the first 20 minutes or so of the ride I had an absolutely uncontrollable desire to hurl myself out of the balloon. I have no idea why, but I literally had to hold myself in. I had no desire to die. On the contrary! It’s my same crazy desire to, say, jump off of a cruise ship at night or jump in front of the subway – it’s like a Siren Song, a call to new experience, to “what would happen if…?” – it was nuts, but the ground was a hot orange in the morning sun, and the air was smooth, and the balloon hovered, silent and still, and I Just. Had. To. Jump. Out.

Fortunately the feeling passed, and we landed safely an hour later. Quick aside: You can’t actually steer a hot-air balloon. There’s no rudder, no fans, so when I say “we landed safely” I’m saying, “Seriously, I have no idea how this guy landed this thing without killing us all.” You change direction by changing altitude, because the wind is moving in different directions at different heights. The Weather Channel, when it says “Winds out of the southwest at 5mph,” is just referring to the air at the surface. If you go 500ft up, the air might be moving northwest at 20mph, and at 550ft it might be out of the west at 0mph; this masterful game, with an element of memory and luck, is the real art to ballooning, the reason you have to get a pilot’s license. Because, I mean, you can’t just park that thing anywhere. There are mountains and rivers and highways. Oh, you could put that thing on the ground just about anywhere, but you need to be able to get the chase vehicle to the location unless you want to carry hundreds of pounds of balloon gear yourself. It was amazing. The landing itself was smooth as a baby’s ass, right into a field with a single tree in the center, and the white pick-up pulled right up beside us. We folded the balloon, Jim disassembled the basket; we met up with the other trucks a few hundred feet away and had the celebratory sparkling apple juice toast.

The rest of the day was spent taking a tour of Jefferson’s Monticello, his “essay in architecture,” which was guided by a taut southern woman who kept calling it “Monti-cellah” and chiding everyone for leaning against “these original walls.” We got lunch at nearby Michie Tavern, which is a charming, if touristy, complex purporting to represent the Old South with a tavern and a dress shop and a general store. Lunch was a “Colonial Southern Buffet” of Colonial barbeque, Colonial fried chicken, and Colonial beans. I’m pretty sure they just put “Colonial” in front of everything for effect; I can’t imagine Jefferson eating himself fat on “Colonial New York-style Cheesecake.”

After that we made the 3-hour trek back to DC, barely able to stay awake after the lack of sleep and early rising, and got back in time for a nap on the Love Sac. Then it was off to Bangkok 54, a great Thai restaurant in Arlington, for dinner with Tooch, Jeep, Val, Mike, and Anne. We played mini-golf that night at nearby Cameron Run park (I won by a stroke), and collapsed, exhausted, into bed. Not bad for a first anniversary.

Although next time, we’re taking an air mattress. If I’m going to look like a yuppie, I might as well sleep like one, too.