Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta

Ever since we moved here, I knew that I wanted to check out the balloon fiesta that they have every year in Albuquerque. It just sounded so neat! For those of you who haven't heard of it, it's the biggest mass ascension of hot air balloons in the world! These pictures (of which I didn't even put a fraction of) don't even do it justice. It was totally worth going to (at least for our family)!

We went on the last Saturday of the fiesta and got there in time for the 'dawn patrol'. I was a bit nervous about getting up that early and wondered if my sleep-loving husband would be up for it, but he was just as excited as me. So we dragged everyone out of bed at 4:30 and drove down.

We wore layers because last year everyone had said that it was freezing. We were glad that we wore layers, because we never even needed our coats. They jackets were just fine. We walked around for a bit and found a spot to wait and just happened to be right in front of the balloons doing the dawn patrol, when they ascend and coordinate the lights while it's still dark. It was pretty cool.

After that we wandered through the balloons, watching a couple of them fill up. We had brought a blanket and we found a spot in the midst of the balloons to let the kids sit for a bit. Then all of a sudden it seemed like we were surrounded by balloons filling up and lifting off. It was awesome. This is the part that the pictures definitely do not show how cool it was to be right in the middle of all those balloons. The kids all thought it was so cool and so did Jason and I.

They had all sorts of balloons from all over the world and it was fun to see the different characters and shapes. We didn't stay much into the day. We grabbed some breakfast from one of the vendors and bought some ornaments for our Christmas tree. Then we headed home and all three kiddos fell asleep on the way.