BALLOON FESTIVAL ROAD TRIP October 2008
Mike and his friend Dick took off in October on a 7 state, 3500 mile road trip. The "destination" on the trip was the week-long annual hot air balloon festival in Albuquerque, New Mexico, but Mike and Dick also visited several air museums and Air Force Bases going and coming.
They headed east on Interstate 80, crossed Nevada, and came to the little town of Wendover, Utah. This was an Army Air Corps training base in WW II, but perhaps achieved greater fame as the site for filming part of the 1997 movie Con Air, starring Nicholas Cage. Next stop was the museum at Hill AFB, just outside of Salt Lake City.
Continuing east, they visited the Air Force Academy at Colorado Springs, and visited a museum at Peterson AFB nearby, where they saw a complete command center from the old Minuteman ICBM days. Also while in Colorado Springs, for a change of pace they visited the Garden of the Gods park, with its varied and unusual rock formations, and Mike stopped in at a local Emergency Room to see what was making his right arm burn and break out in odd-looking rashes. (Turned out it was Shingles, the "old man's version of Chicken Pox."
Now they headed south towards New Mexico, and saw some fall colors as they traversed a mountain pass. A surprise while traveling across the high-mountain desert terrain was a huge gorge made by the Rio Grande River, a sort of mini-Grand Canyon.
At last they reached Albuquerque, and checked into their motel. (This was the most expensive one on the whole trip, but chosen because it's the only one within walking distance of the park where the balloons are launched.) They were in the park at 5:45am for the Dawn Patrol event, where a dozen or so balloons are launched in the dark, and then enjoyed the Mass Ascension, with over 600 balloons of all sizes and shapes launched within a few minutes. One of the interesting aspects of the Albuquerque Festival is that the spectators can mingle on the field with all the balloons, getting as close to the action as they want to. During the mid-day break at the balloon festival, Mike and Dick visited the nearby National Atomic Museum, learning all about the Manhattan Project,including Roosevelt and Truman's roles, seeing an exact replica of Fat Boy, the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima, learning how nuclear power plants work, what the issues are on recycling spent fuel rods, etc. The wind came up that night, cancelling the balloon activities, but the fireworks went on as scheduled. (As a sad footnote, Mike and Dick learned after they returned home that one of the balloons in the pre-dawn launch they watched was involved in a accident later in the week -- the balloon hit some power lines, caught fire, and crashed, with one of the pilots killed and the other seriously injured.)
Mike and Dick next headed south and west towards Tucson, Arizona, where they visited the Pima Air and Space Museum, a huge facility that gives lots of attention to civilian aircraft as well as those from the military. They also took a bus ride through the aircraft "boneyard" at nearby Davis-Monthan AFB. (This is sort of a storage and junk yard for old military aircraft.) Although most of what was in the boneyard was planes, there were some old Minuteman ICBMs, which were there to be cut up into scrap as part of the SALT treaty with the Soviet Union.
Back on the road and headed north to Phoenix, where Mike and Dick visited the Arizona branch of the Commenerative Air Force (formerly called the Confederate Air Force), a nationwide volunteer group that restores old aircraft to flying condition, and participates in air shows. Their main attraction was a completely restored B-17 bomber of WW II vintage, which just returned from a summer performing in over a dozen air shows around the country. You could not only see it, but crawl around inside it -- boy is it cramped !
Phoenix was the last stop on the trip, and Mike and Dick headed on back to California. Besides all the things they went to see, they also enjoyed the nature side of the trip, happened upon a famous bus, and even saw a fork in the road.
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