A Summer Adventure!

 I haven't been able to do much reading (my poor neglected summerbooks!), because I've been having adventures all over the place....

My good friend Melanie wanted to do a hot-air balloon trip for her birthday, and her husband was like 'no way' so I said I'd do it and she asked all her friends.  We got a total of just three -- Melanie, her friend Bryn (who lives near Seattle) and me.   

We set out from Chico with many snacks, and dilly-dallied our way down to Tahoe.  There was no hurry, so we stopped a few times.  We went to Donner Pass and walked through the disused railroad tunnels above Donner Lake.  That was super fun, and I highly recommend it.   There are four tunnels along the hillside, with space between them.  Parts are blasted rock and other parts have been smoothed out with concrete, and a whole lot of the space is covered in graffiti.  There's still snow melting in June, so it was pretty drippy, and the fourth tunnel was inaccessible due to water, unless we wanted to get our feet soaked more than is convenient on a road trip.  But it's a great walk.  A flashlight and a hat are good ideas.   Bring spray paint and a plan, there's tons of room for more art in the dark parts.

We arrived in Tahoe and the house we were staying in was very nice.  We had to empty the car of all snacks because of bears. We were in the bottom floor of the house, and the mom and her kids live in the top half.  And we went to a restaurant that is a Scottish pub, which was yummy, but did not have halloumi fries. 

The next morning we had to be at the dock by 5:15 am.  They loaded us on to a sort of double decker barge.  We puttered out to the side of the lake that was best for ballooning, according to the wind.  (They only fly when the weather is right, and so they only take your money after the trip. They said the two days previous they'd had to cancel.  So we were pretty happy that it was a good day for it.). Once they're in a good spot, the crew guys roll out this gigantic balloon. They said it's the second biggest kind made. Everybody watches while they fill it up with air from a couple of big fans, and eventually they put all the people in the basket and start heating up the air. They do two flights per boat trip, and we were in the second trip, which was great. We could watch the first trip, which was fun in itself, and our trip wound up going a little longer. 

So first the pilot guy bops around the lake a little bit, staying low down and making for Instagrammable photos. They like to show off by touching down to the water and then taking off again.  Then they go up high and wander around the lake for a while. The advantage to doing it from a boat is that while a balloon is only sort of steerable -- you can vent on one side or the other -- a boat is very steerable and can just position itself under the balloon for a landing.  The balloon just swoops in, the crew grabs it, and they tuck it into the landing spot. It's a pretty impressive trick and this company is the only one in the world licensed to do it, but it also strikes me as very efficient and something more people ought to do.  Passengers get a nice boat ride as well as a balloon trip and feel like they've really gotten their money's worth.

 

 

Our turn was a slightly longer flight, and he took us up to 12,000 ft altitude. Tahoe itself is at 6,000 ft, so we were 6,000 ft above that, and that's as high as you can go without taking oxygen along. He even took us over the land, brushing the tops of pine trees, which was pretty great.  Of course you can't beat the views of an early summer day at Lake Tahoe.  I think we would have enjoyed more meditative silence, but of course part of the pilot's job is to tell entertaining stories and play thematic songs. He also gave us plain popcorn to throw over the side, for two reasons. One, people really want to throw things over the side and will throw random awful things if not stopped with popcorn. Two, popcorn looks pretty floating away, and when we started going down, we caught up to the falling popcorn and that was really fun.  You could throw it out and it would fly 'up.'

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I was quite worried that I would be scared, or do something embarrassing like throw up or pass out.  I always feel sort of oogy on the side of a cliff or the balcony of a tall building. It turns out that hot air ballooning is not one bit scary. It feels very stable and not precarious at all! Since you're going with the wind, there isn't any, and even when you're descending quite fast you can't tell.  The only thing I wouldn't do was hold my phone out over the edge of the basket to take pictures; that just strikes me as asking for trouble. (The pilot said that in many hundreds of trips he's had six people lose phones.)

We got done and it wasn't even 11am yet. Which was good, because we had plenty to do. We went back to our house and packed up the car, and headed back to Chico to drop Bryn off.  We tried to take naps, which didn't work very well, but I was happy to have an hour or so at home to rest. Then Melanie picked me up and we hit the road again.  We wanted to get as far as possible that evening. We got to Reno around sunset, and decided to aim for Winnemucca.  Melanie is ambitious and enjoys night driving in Nevada, because Nevada is a lot prettier in the dark. She would really have preferred to get to Elko, but that would have taken hours longer and we were getting pretty tired by the time we got to Winnemucca.  To our surprise, there wasn't much in the way of hotel rooms available. The place is crammed with hotel casinos but apparently they get pretty full in June. We managed to find a room at a hotel that was rated about 7.5, and if that was a 7.5 I would hate to see what the 5s are like.  The place was a dump, but it was a reasonably clean dump and it didn't have bed bugs. It also cost too much. 

The next morning we drove through the other half of Nevada, which was mostly unpleasant and hot.  We only stopped a couple of times at Maverik gas stations, which theoretically feature food but very little of it is edible. Good thing we had those car snacks.  A handful of trail mix is a fine lunch, right?  Eventually we reached a large quilt shop in Sandy, Utah, and spent a happy half hour or so browsing. Melanie was trying to meet a friend before heading off to her family's get together, and I was trying to figure out where my friends were.  We successfully managed everything, met up with my friend Kim, and I went home with her. 

I spent several days hanging out at the southern end of the Salt Lake Valley. Mostly we were home with  children, as Kim is in a complicated summer with various adult children living in basements before grad school starts in the fall, and having babies all over the place. There was a 4yo and a 4-month-old at Kim's house, and a 2-year-old and a newborn belonging to a different adult child who is also in the neighborhood, living in a basement too.  I brought a book or so as gifts.  I was taken to several Utah cultural spots, which means I have now had a dirty soda (yummy, but definitely a sometimes treat and tastes kind of like a soda milkshake dessert) and a Dairy Queen Blizzard.  Utah is all about the sugar. I didn't have any of those cookies they sell.  Mostly I just tried to be reasonably useful! 

On Monday, I took the commuter train up to a good spot for pickup, and Melanie and I hit the road again, but she had plans.  If you've ever driven on I-80 through Utah, you've seen the salt flats, and of course I'd always wanted to go stand/drive on them, but I didn't know where to do that.  Melanie did!  She got off the freeway at the Bonneville Speedway, which I'd always assumed would have some sort of official infrastructure, and which absolutely does not.  You simply drive down a road that ends in the middle of the flats, and you start driving around.  The ground really is completely, utterly flat like pavement, except where tires have dug it up a little bit.  White salt covers the dirt, and gets all over the car.  We had a good time driving around and pretending we were in Knight Rider, and then got back on the freeway, vowing to find a carwash in the next town.

The next town knows very well that people want a carwash, and the place we found was a total ripoff.  Fourteen bucks for the worst mechanical wash I've ever seen in my whole life.  A girl at the gas station told us where to find a DIY wash at the other end of town, so we went and did that too. 

After that, it was one very long ride through Nevada.  We stopped in Winnemucca again for a quilt shop, which was inexplicably closed.  Reno delivered, though, and we spent a happy hour looking at fabric.  Dinner was in Grass Valley and we finally got home around 10pm.  I've been in recovery ever since!