Hot Air Balloons!

Friday morning I got the boys up at 5:30 in the morning so I could take them to see the hot air balloons that were part of Provo's Freedom Festival. We have never been before, and I knew that they would LOVE it.

We got there early enough that parking was not a problem. We even got to see the first balloon get inflated. The piggy bank balloon from the Bank of American Fork.

We had fun watching them use their big fans to pump air into the balloon and the pig started to take shape. Then they turned on the burner and the balloon eased up into the morning sky. Ephraim and Jacob were both fascinated.

Here it is fully inflated. It was by far the boys' favorite balloon. Can you blame them?

I was a smart mommy and packed the double trailer. That way I could wheel the boys around and be sure that I knew where they were while I was taking pictures.

We ran around quite a bit, watching as the different balloons slowly took shape and filled the air.

We got pretty close to the action, and pretty close to the balloons. Jacob even got out and touched one of them!

One by one the balloons inflated and filled the morning sky. It was a beautiful thing to watch.

We could even get close enough to the baskets to see the insides of the balloons as they were inflating. It was really cool!

My favorite balloon was definitely the Coke bottle balloon! It kind of made me thirsty.

The really cool part was that we got to walk around the field and watch the balloonists in action. I wheeled the boys around in the stroller and we could see everything. We even got to watch them turn on the burner and heat up the air in the balloon. So cool!

There were a total of thirteen balloons that we got to see inflated. Here is another one of the boys' favorites; the Smokey the Bear balloon.

The only bummer was that the weather aloft was not good enough for the balloons to launch. Only one of the balloons even got off the ground, and it was tethered so it wouldn't go up too high.

So we were a bit disappointed that the balloons didn't launch. But we did have a fantastic time seeing all the hot air balloons. They were so beautiful!

We even got to see the sunrise over the field full of balloons.

There were three days of the hot air balloons scheduled, but we didn't make it back to see them again because we were too busy. I actually heard that they didn't launch the balloons on Friday either because it was too windy!

We will definitely have to go to see the hot air balloons again next year... and hopefully we will get to see them fly!