Balloon Riding

Friday, November 21, 2025

Tom and Louise got a hot air balloon ride for two from a silent auction (or something). Louise was not interested, so Tom invited Keith to join him. The weather conditions need to be just right, so we have scheduled and rescheduled and rescheduled 6 or 7 or 12 times. Today was the day!! I was so excited just that it was finally happening that I didn’t have time to be excited about the boys riding in a balloon. We got there and watched them fill up the balloon with air from fans, then warm it up with the fire. Before we knew it, Louise was playing Would you like to ride in my beautiful balloon? on her phone and the boys were lifting off.

I’ll let Keith talk about this…

I’ve always wanted to go up in a hot air balloon. I was right. It was great fun.

I’m not sure how to describe it. It doesn’t feel like you’re flying or even that you’re floating, hanging in a basket. It’s more like you’re just somehow in the sky. The ride is dead silent. Almost spooky. Well, that’s except when the pilot pulls on the throttle, sending flames up into the balloon. That is very loud, but then completely quiet immediately when she stops again. That is usually only seconds at a time. We got used to her occasionally pulling on it, then the loud sound, then silence again. You’d start a sentence, pause during the noise, then un-pause when it stopped. It all felt very natural the way it broke up the conversation.

Our young pilot, Emma, was the owner of the business (Stillwater Balloons). She and her husband bought it from her father. You could see the excitement in her face during the entire ride. She loved being up in the sky and it really showed. She has been a pilot for about five years and flew (floated?) with her father for years before that as a passenger, then later apprentice. Many years earlier, her father took over the business from the family he worked for at that time in much the same way.

We could not have asked for a better day. It was almost 50°, sunny, and clear. There was also precious little wind. She had to maneuver the balloon up to over 2600 feet to find enough wind to push us over the Lower St Croix River. There was so little wind at the surface that the river was like glass and since most boats have been stored for winter by this time, there were only a couple boats on the river. Seeing the empty, smooth river was a new experience. I recently read about how one pilots a balloon. You can’t steer it in a traditional sense (through some mechanism like a wheel/rudder). You move up or down by either adding heat to the balloon or letting out heat via vents at the top of the balloon using ropes. A balloon pilot is more meteorologist than pilot. Winds change directions at different altitudes, so you need to understand where these changes occur and move up or down appropriately to move in the desired direction. It’s both art and science and was very interesting to see firsthand.

We had a double landing. As we were coming down for our landing, the winds changed closed to the ground and blew us in the wrong direction. So, we didn’t quite touch down, then went back up again, over another hill, skimmed right over the trees, lightly brushing a few, flew only a few feet above a road with several cars (with people all pointing up at us or waving), saw some deer in the woods, then had our actual landing, which was very gentle, in a park in Hudson. The last ten minutes were the best part of the ride, where we had the false landing, then brushed lowly over the trees. Very exciting.

I highly recommend the experience.

Lots of pictures here, some taken by me in the air and others by Barbara or me on the ground.