Up Up and Away

We're spending Father's Day weekend in Vermont to enjoy the Annual Quechee Balloon, Craft and Music Festival. As a bonus it's a little bit of a family getaway to keep celebrating our wedding anniversary. For those of you who love to keep up with everyone's miserable weather, let me just say that we are having it. Day after day of dreary gray, drizzly weather. I feel like I'm back in Ohio. In fact, I almost suggested cancelling the trip due to weather. I mean, what's a balloon festival in the clouds and rain? However, we trucked on up here, about 2-3 hours north and west of us hoping the weather would be a little different (even though weather.com wasn't very encouraging).

After arriving at the hotel (which, by the way, appears to be the hotel for all the balloonists), we snacked up and headed to the "green" in Quechee (pronouched Quee-chee) to see what we could see. No balloons yet, but pay to play jumpees, slides, train rides, rock walls, etc.

Open our wallets and just hand over all our money, right? We indulge the kids a little and head over for some festival fare for dinner. At this point it's drizzling so we're thankful for a tented eating area--even more thankful when a downpour falls while we're still under the tent eating. Wow. There's no bad weather, just bad clothes (too bad we're in bad clothes).

Eventually the rain clears and blue skies roll in behind it (although, technically I suppose the gray clouds rolled out), and the balloons were fantastic. So, so pretty. Well, all except the stupid ones with advertisements--bleck (just consider it a photographer's challenge--how to keep them out of the pictures :) if you look carefully, you can see the balloon in this shot with the ad on it).

After the balloons departed we headed back to the festival fare for dessert--fried dough, cotton candy, all the good stuff. Plus we did a little browsing at all the craft booths. And listened to the band play while the kids danced...very cute. Then it was back to the fields to watch the 'balloon glow' (a few balloons lit up in the twilight).

Now I'm waiting for the more than 300 pictures I took to download from the camera so I can share one or two with you. (ugh--it's painful). Tomorrow we might go back to the festival for a little bit to see some of the other demonstrations. Or we might head to Quechee Gorge for some hiking. If we're lucky we can find a geocache or two to torture the kids with.