My friend Lauren posted on facebook that she had an extra ticket to a hot air balloon festival on Saturday evening. I had heard nothing about this festival so I did a little googling. What I found sounded fantastic. We (me, Michael, Spencer and my mom) decided to go. Megan decided to bring Scott and Hadley and join us. Lauren was coming with Shireen and Desmond. It was going to be such a good time.
This is the description of the event. This is cut straight from the press release:
More than 50 hot-air balloons will participate in a family-friendly balloon festival during the inaugural Arizona Balloon Classic, November 18 – 20 at Wild Horse Pass/Rawhide at the Gila River Indian Community. The weekend celebration will feature dawn patrol and morning liftoffs and landings, afternoon mass ascensions and evening glow events.
The balloons will launch and land from the grassy fields at Wild Horse Pass/Rawhide, filling the skies with massive shapes and color. Spectators will be allowed to walk on the field and watch the balloons inflate and lift off. Desert Glows, set to take place on Friday and Saturday evenings, November 18 and 19, will feature a field full of illuminated, tethered, hot-air balloons glowing and swaying to live musical performances. The weekend will also include family-friendly entertainment, skydivers, fireworks, a Family Fun Zone with children’s activities, exhibits, sampling, shopping and more.
This is what really sold it to me. The reason we decided to go:
Afternoon Fun Flights- On Friday, Saturday & Sunday at about 4:30 p.m. about 50 colorful hot-air balloons will lift-off all at the same time. It's a wonderful photo opportunity!
So, all of Maricopa County must have read this press release and agreed that it sounded like a wonderful experience, because parking was a nightmare. It took all of us between 30 minutes to an hour to just get from the freeway to a parking spot.
We managed to make it in to the festival by 4:35. I was so excited to see all 50 balloons.
And then. And then we realized that they were big fat liars.
Want to know how many hot air balloons there were? We're talking Grand Total. And not even all inflated at once.
Six.
Yep. Six balloons. That's it.
My dad is of the opinion that we should file a complaint with the attorney general's office. That seems like a lot of work, but it was definitely a rip-off.
These are the pictures I got of this oh most lame festival.
Spencer did have fun in the bounce houses. His fun was not worth the $20 Michael and I spend and the $7 my mom spent to get in.
The illuminated balloons were not impressive either. The "coordinated" glowing and swaying to music (that was NOT live) lasted about 1 minute.
There were quite a few food booths available. I just don't think there is a single fry bread or bag of kettle corn in the world that is worth a 1 hour wait.
The skydivers were fun. It was a thrill that lasted approximately 1.5 minutes.
We decided we were going to leave before the fireworks and drive somewhere close-by to watch them so we could beat the nightmare that would be traffic leaving the event. The fireworks started on the way to the car so we ended up watched them standing in the parking lot. The second they ended we threw Spencer in his car seat and got the hell out of there.
We give the balloon festival 2 thumbs down. We will not be returning next year.
2 comments:
At least they let us park for free.
We went Friday afternoon with the same high hopes based on the description. Thankfully for us, I got the tickets on Groupon so I only paid $8 total. And there were not that many people there so there were no lines or anything. And we saw 12 balloons. Still far short of 50 and they did not all lift off at once or light up at once. I wish I had known you were going, I would have told you to save your money. Actually I'm not sure that's true because we kind of wondered if it would be bigger and better on Saturday instead.
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