Good Morning!

Having a difficult time sleeping last night (I oddly had second thoughts about the shoes I was choosing for the girls.....more details on that another day) I stayed in bed a little longer this morning. Somewhere around 8:00 Zac came running into our bedroom and yelled:

"There's a hot air balloon crashing on our front lawn! I gotta go!"

Before I had a chance to ask any questions he was already bounding down the stairs and running out the front door, Jim hot on his trail. Since this is our sense of humor with one another, at first I thought he was just messing around and trying to get me out of bed. Realizing that he had actually run outside I decided it didn't matter if he was joking or not, I was curious to see what was going on. Plus, it wouldn't be the first time we've seen hot air balloons floating above our neighborhood. (We don't live too far from Valley Children's Hospital which is where the balloons take off from.) You might remember a post  from earlier this summer (found here) in which Zac and I climbed up on the roof of our back patio one morning to watch about five hot air balloons float along on their journey.

So I jumped out of bed and followed Zac outside and this is what I saw:

It hadn't crashed and it wasn't on our front lawn (what can I say, my Zac knows how to spin a story!) but a hot air balloon really had landed safely on our block just two houses away! It certainly isn't a sight you see every morning and our neighbors came spilling out of their homes to check out the balloon. The cutest spectators were three little children still in their pjs, who were very excited to see the balloon and eager to talk to the people in the balloon's basket. Zac said it reminded him of when he was little and his parents took him and his siblings to Valley Children's Hospital very early in the morning to watch the hot air balloons get ready and take off into the sky.

Just like the last time we saw hot air balloons there were several of them in the air. (If you look closely at the photo above you can see another one in the distance to the left of the balloon just under the streetlamp.) We didn't get the full story on why/how this balloon found it's way onto our street, but we figured that perhaps the balloon had been thrown off course by the morning breeze. Several vehicles eventually showed up on our street, including a van from the hot air balloon company (of which Zac and I can't remember the name...we'd be horrible eye witnesses) that came to take the balloon away.

The people started to lay out a giant orange sheet (it reminded me of the parachutes we used in P.E. in elementary school). The children who were watching were excited to hear that they could help lay out the sheet to prepare of the balloon to be deflated. Once it was all spread out on the street everyone backed up and they brought the balloon down.

Here they are bringing down the beast:

I've never seen a hot air balloon deflated in person and I was amazed that something that big could be taken down on a neighborhood street without any worries of getting stuck in a tree or landing on a parked car. It was also the first time that I had seen a hot air balloon in person at all and let me tell you that Zac and I were amped to go for a ride. We've decided to look up the cost for a hot air balloon excursion...it might be our next adventure....after the wedding of course.

So that was how I woke up this morning! Hope everyone has a fantastic Saturday!