Hot Air Balloon ride

So as I mentioned before, we did basically no planning on things to do for this trip.  Literally the day before we left I went on Google and searched for "things to do in Temecula".  Wine Tasting came up, which I already knew, and Hot Air Balloon rides.  So I thought that would be really cool.  Figured we would wait to get here and see what sort of deals there were.  I've always wanted to go up in a hot air balloon, so I was pretty excited about the possibility.

As soon as we got to the hotel on Wednesday, we found a place and made a reservation for this morning.  You have to meet there at 6:30am, which is no biggee since we are used to being 3 hours ahead and have not adjusted to west coast time.  The mornings here are cold, so we dressed in layers and met up at the winery where we needed to go.  From there, we got in a van and drove out to a launch site (a dirt field).  The guys there got the balloon laid out and filled it up.  We all climbed in (there were 10 people in our balloon plus the pilot) and just like that we started to float up.  It was spectacular!

They don't normally have low/thin clouds around here in the morning (usually no clouds...think desert).  But this morning they did and it was beautiful.  Sometimes we would go down really low (to the point where you could almost pick the grapefruits off the grapefruit trees) and sometimes we would go way up above the clouds (to about 2200 feet).  It was incredible how the wind would move the balloon in different directions depending on how high we were.  The balloon ride lasted about an hour and 20 minutes I think.  We had some issues trying to land near the other balloon in our group.  The winds changed after they landed and so we ended up on the other side of the street, but our pilot got us maneuvered up over the power lines and across the street.  Just takes experience and lots of patience I guess! 

Here are pics from our ride: