Traffic is crawling, stop and go,stop and go. Ahead we can see 3 enormous balloons bobbing and weaving. Sometimes they wink out. Sometimes they look like they are about to fall over before we hear the whoosh and see them stand tall again. It seems like we aren’t making much progress. Street parking is out of the question. When we spot a place without a car it’s because there’s a pile of dirt or a boulder blocking the spot.
Pedestrians crossed freely in front of the crawling line of traffic. Inside I was holding my breath waiting for my sister to tell me this was ridiculous.
We’d been at the airport until about 6pm but the wind never died down enough for the hot air balloons to take off. When we left they were just spread out like lovely colored bed spreads.
Our mistake was not coming straight up to Lake George. We detoured over to George and Kelly’s house. We were just going to make a quick stop. As usually happens when you connect with relatives, especially some you don’t see often, you get to visiting and our quick stop turned into 30-40 minutes…just like that! Not that I’m complaining. I enjoyed the visit too.
A half hour drive to Lake George and it was already 7:30. Moonglow was at 8pm according to the published schedule. But if 8pm was the start time, what were we slowly approaching?
Finally we passed the park and the balloons and found a rough parking lot. $6.00 to park . Grabbing camera, tripod and folding chairs we headed back in the direction we’d just come along with a steady stream of others anxious to see the brightly lit balloons.
To my surprise we easily got in the front row with plenty of room even with the crowd! I set up as fast as I could in the dark. It was hard to judge where the balloons were in the frame when the lights went out but I did the best I could. A little girl with a glow stick was running around near us. I was pretty sure she was in the frame on some of the pictures but it was hard to tell. I wasn’t going to tell her to stop. She was having way too much fun!
Blue Light Trails from Glow Stick
The balloons were tethered so other than the lights there wasn’t much to see. At about 8pm one of the balloons suddenly began deflating. Then the others began to follow. The show was over! We can only assume there was a misprint on the schedule because it definitely said it was to start at 8..not end. Oh well, at least we got to see a bit of the “Moon glow”.
We headed back to the car to try to beat the rush. I wanted a couple of “night shots” of the lights from the shore reflecting in the lake before we left. When we were almost back to the parking lot I set the tripod back up and began to focus when BANG! the fireworks started.
We stood there on the sidewalk and watched the display of lights fly up into the sky over the lake.
It was a great way to finish up the night. We hustled off to the car before the finale because we just knew the traffic would be bad if we waited. Even with the head start it was still bumper to bumper and “dodge ’em” with the pedestrians. Still I’m really glad we made the effort to go. It was beautiful.
Saturday night they want to have a 40 balloon “Moonglow” at the Warren County Airport. I bet that will really be something to see.
