Today was the opening day of the Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta. Because of that, we needed to be on the road by 5:15am. What normally is a 10 minute drive, took us almost an hour, due to the traffic near the park. We managed to get to the park by 6:00am.
Since it was still dark when we got there, we decided to pick up some breakfast from the vendors at the park, before heading out to the field. Karen went with the made to order breakfast quesadilla (bacon, egg, cheese, salsa) and I went with the cinnamon roll. There are many strange food choices that people can have here for breakfast. The most popular items are the breakfast burritos, corn on the cob and turkey legs. Turkey at 6am, I don’t think so.
After breakfast we made our way to the balloons and spent the next four hours walking around (the park is the size of 54 football fields) and taking lots and lots of pictures. According to the newspaper, there were 631 balloons registered and it’s the most photographed event in the world. It’s always a magical experience to watch hundreds of balloons float overhead at the same time … like being in the middle of somebody blowing huge bubbles. There were lots of balloons that we recognized from past trips, and new ballons too, including a 100 foot tall replica of a cathedral from Switzerland.
We left the park and headed over to the Rio Grande Arts & Craft Festival. This is the best craft show that I’ve ever been to. The artists at this show do amazing work, and sell very unique things.
By this time, it was 1pm and we were really tired. We went back to the hotel and had a lay down by the pool for an hour. This is the warmest October that I’ve ever experienced in New Mexico. Around 75 °F this afternoon.
We are lucky that our motel is only two blocks from Old Town, so we decided to walk over. Old Town was buzzing with lots of people. In the middle of the square, we enjoyed a mariachi band and flamenco dancers. We thought that we should have an early dinner so we ended up at the Church Street Cafe. This is the restaurant where we were originally introduced to the sopaipilla. This time we enjoyed a stuffed sopaipilla with vanilla ice cream. Yummy.
As we were walking back to the motel, it started to drizzle. This wasn’t a good sign, since we were heading back to the balloon fiesta to enjoy the evening glowdeo and fireworks. We got to the park and the first bad sign was that they weren’t charging for parking. The second bad sign was that we got a spot really close to the entrance. We rested in the car while waiting to hear if the evening’s events were being cancelled. It started to rain really hard so we decided to leave. Hopefully we’ll get to see fireworks next weekend.
We didn’t want to head back to the hotel yet, so we decided to kill some time at the Cottonwood Mall.
I’m hoping for more than just a couple of hours of sleep tonight, so I can be more coherent tomorrow. 4:30 AM comes very early!
Be First to Comment