This event I will have an all female crew.  I have Regina Rementer, and Christina Pallitto and Maggie Mae for my ground team.  This will be Christina's second balloon event and she is all excited because she will be the team Crew Chief!  She has been asking Steve a bunch of questions about what her responsibilities will be at the event but I figure we have an 8 hour drive on the way up where I can explain all the things she will know.  The most important will be running the GPS/Laptop so they do not get lost on the chase.  We will have a local crew that will know the roads so it should not be to bad. 

From what I have heard from brother Jon who has been to this event there are tons of sod farms around the area and you may land at any of them.  You can not drive out on the grass but if you walk the balloon over to the road you are more than welcome to lay your balloon out in the grass.  Jon also said that there are many areas that you do not want to get out over since the winds there become very light in the evenings and you could get stalled over some undesirable terrain.  We will have to use Google earth to try to avoid that!  I figure most of the flights will be fly in so all I have to do is just hit the target field!  No worries. 

We are also taking Maggie Mae.  I think it is time that girl had her first flight.  I will be getting a harness for her just in case but I think she will do just fine.  Maggie has been to several balloon events and she has been out with us on the passenger flights many many times.  She is quite at home around balloons and should be just fine in flight. 

This will be Gina's very first balloon event.  She is both excited and nervous at the same time but I am sure she will do just fine.  She has flown with me before but never even seen a balloon event like this.  I am sure she will have a great time.  At this event it is unlikely that we will have passengers for us to fly so we will get a few media people to fly but it is my guess that Christina and Gina will get to fly on at least one flight each if not more. 

Ok,  Back to my lists.  Have a ton more stuff to do to get ready.  More in the morning.

Jeff

GCBF Ground Team

Christina

Gina

Maggie Mae

Thursday 06/17/10

Well our trip up was uneventful.   The girls went in and out of naps the whole time.  Took just a little over 8 hours to get into Foley and we found our hotel fairly easily.  We then went down to the elementary school where the registration was going to be.  As we pulled into the elementary school there  was Dave Sullivan standing at the entrance on the phone.  We pulled up and he waived us on and you could see him saying keep going keep going.  So I did, went back out into the street and went around again.  We came back up to where he was and he was laughing at us.  I told him I would have keep going round and round till he told us to stop.  We had a good laugh.

Went thru registration and got our goodies and baggies and tennis ball..  Don't ask I don't know yet.  Basket banner and stuff.  We headed back to the hotel but realized that we would not have enough time. So we pulled over on the side of the road and did a commando raid on the pilot bag to separate the stuff that we needed to have from the stuff that was as I call trinkets and trash.  We headed back out to the balloon field for the 4:45 pilot brief.  Man was it hot.  The temp was 97 and there was very little wind and they had placed the tent where the long side of the tent was facing the sun.  So even under the tent in the shade Soooo was very hot.  Thunderstorms were popping to our east and after looking at radar we could see a line of them extending about 70 miles to the north.  The did not look as they were going to come our way but they were close enough that we could hear big rumbles when the thunder came thru.  About 5:30 someone stepped up to the microphone.  I thought great we are going to have a pilot meeting and they said test test....  Then walked away from the microphone.  LOL..  Sike...We waited another 30 minutes before anyone ever said a thing.  They put us on hold for another 30 minutes.  We hung around for another 30 minutes and I sat and talked with Dave for a while then we all decided that it was not going to happen and headed out for dinner.  I told the girls we were going to go some place special for our first night in Foley.  There was a place that my brother Jon had told me about called Lamberts Cafe.  he said that it was quite the place and that we had to go there.  The line was out the door so I am guessing it IS quite the place.  We were hot sweaty tired hungry and had Maggie with us so a two hour wait for dinner was not cool.  So we went across the street to cracker barrel where the girls spotted a chair that we all go a laugh out of.  I figure if you are so fat they must put an extender on your seat you should not be in a restaurants.  We came back to the hotel and went for a swim at the pool.  Hot day great pool  Perfect end.  In fact when we all got back up the room we only had one beer and we were ready to sack out. 

Sorry no photos yet.  I forgot my cable from the camera to the computer so we will have to make a stop at Wal-Mart today.  Check in later to see the photos from the trip up.  The fat chair was taken on my phone. 

More later. Jeff

I am guessing the portions at this Cracker barrel are large!

Friday PM Shots.

Friday

06/18/10

Friday AM Flight

Well we had a very nice but quick flight this morning.  we went out to the field be there were very few people there and they were on a weather hold.  there were thunderstorms out in the gulf that had not died over night.  There were a couple of balloons on the field that were tethering.  We thought this would be a good time to uncover the basket and put our sponsor banner on the basket  as well as give Gina a chance to see how a basket is put together.  As we were doing this we noticed about a dozen balloon in the next field over laying out.  Guess they called a GO on the flight.  So we scrambled to put the basket together and move over to the launch field. As we pulled in Dave Sullivan was just lifting off.  We inflated in a hurry and my parachute pulley got tangled in the bridle so I had to climb up into the balloon to untangle it and we were off.  A couple of people came over to the basket to help and the lady ask if we had room in the basket for one more.  I said sure and her son Richard jumped onboard.  Gina flew with me and Elizabeth (Richards mom) and Christina took off on the chase.  I was going to follow Dave since he has flown here before but it seemed as he had no real target in mind and I could see a beautiful field out in front a few miles where it looked like we had access so sent Christina there to wait.  Two other balloon landed there so I knew it was going to be good so that was my target.  Told Christina to park the truck in between the other balloons and I would land there. We took some photos and some video on the flight.  I will load them later this afternoon when we get back to the hotel.

Our local crewperson Elizabeth was full of questions.  She was telling Christina what back roads to take to follow along with the balloon and did not understand why Christina was going so far out in front of the balloon..  Then when she parked the truck in the field she was totally baffled.  Should we be chasing him?  We cant just sit here?!  Christina assured Elizabeth that I would come and land right there.  As we did.  and she was very impressed.  We packed up and went back to the field only to find out that the propane truck was not going to come out to fuel until after the flight tonight.  So we headed into town to find some propane.  Luckily there was an Ace hardware right on the main strip that had a big refueling station out front. We got the balloon fueled and broken down and covered then off to Wal-Mart for supplies. 

We had lunch at a place called Lamberts Cafe.  This was a suggestion of my brother Jon's.  It was a good one. The place did not open until 10:30 so we had a little bit of a wait but there were people lined up at the door even before the place opened.  Every time they have a batch of hot rolls come out of the oven someone comes out into the dining room with trays of rolls on a cart and yells HOT ROLLS!!  If you raise your hand to indicate you would like one they THROW IT!!!!  yes all across the dining room.  Better be ready if you raise your hand cause the roll will be sipping thru the air at you in no time.  They also have people walking around the place with great big pots of all sorts of food.  If you want some just ask and they will plop a big spoonful on your plate.  It was great and the girls had a fun lunch.  We are now back at the hotel taking a break from the heat before the night flight.

Friday Night Flight

Can you Say Thunderstorm.   O boy. We are sitting right in the middle of the four hundred warning boxes.  We are stuck in the school gymnasium  The power has flickered on and of a couple of times already.  Looks like we will be sitting for a while.  We are scheduled to fly in to the target field tonight.  We have to drop a tennis ball into a small Childs pool that will be floating out in a lake on the north side of the festival fields.  The other half of the balloons are going to be doing a glow on the field.  We will see what the weather does.  Our sponsor is a no show at this time.  Sponsors were supposed to show up here at the school so we could introduce ourselves.  We will see if they hook up with us out at the field. 

Well we have gone back out to the field and are doing the night glow.  Tommy was very pleased that even though we were not supposed to glow because we were on the fly in task and did not have to fly we came out to glow anyway.

Just a quick note.  Maggie Mae is afraid of the elevator.  It took some time to get her broke in but she is now getting on with us.  She visibly does not like it but each time it gets better.

The Glow is done and time to go back to the VIP tent for dinner.  The girls have decided to pass on dinner since they are serving fried chicken.  So they have decided to have Gummies for dinner with beer.  We listened to the band for a while and they were very good.  There was a female drummer and Gina plays the drum so both her and I were very impressed with her.  Mostly for the same reasons.

So were here at the hotel and I am writing the Thursday blog and the girls are raped up in their blankets and sitting on the couch and telling story's and drinking.  I took out the video and taped them a bit and neither of them remember my videoing them at all!  Good fun.  Time for bed.

O BTW.  When we got back to the hotel I asked the girls to break down the basket and get it covered.  I wish I had the video because watching them do this half drunk was very entertaining!  They did it well and they both believe it was record time..  Actually I will withhold my comments at this time.

Friday has become more entertaining than you can imagine.  I have two girls here in the room who are having the time of their lives.  I will explain in the morning..  But for now lets just say...  Giddy!!

Saturday 06/19/10

Ok  Well we got to bed at about 11:30 and since we are in Alabama the time is one hour earlier here so sunrise is also an hour earlier.  Our pilot meeting is at 5am so we must get up at 3:30 to be there on time.  Fun getting my girls up and running on time.

We stole some crew last night from another pilot who had more than he could possibly need and our assigned crew did not show up last night so we needed at least one.  We were lucky to get a family of three who had been out in previous years and did know what they were doing. 

The task was a fly in task and the winds were from the north on the surface with a left turn up high.  Great steerage.  I had fired up my laptop at the pilot brief and looked at the winds aloft and already had a good idea of where we needed to go for a good run.  We went out into the area I thought we should and launched a helium balloon to check the winds.  I decided we needed to move further to the east for a good launch site.  When we came back to go further east there must have been 30 crews sitting along the road we had just gone down and there were no balloon teams there when we went down.  We found a warehouse area but the parking area was already filled with a few balloons so we just laid out along the entrance road to the warehouse. 

Everyone did fantastic and we had the balloon up and ready in no time.  I threw Karen's two kids in the balloon with me for the flight.  Chris (the son) and Shelby (the daughter) were thrilled to get to fly.  Shelby had to be talked into the tether the night before so it was nice to see that she had no hesitation about going for the flight after the tether the night before.  We  got airborne and had a great shot on the main field.  As I came in there was a red balloon directly below me and I could not come down.  We were mostly on the same track but the right turn was just below the red balloon and a couple of hundred feet above him.  As we came into the field I just could not get into the turn soon enough but had about a 60 foot drop.  Not good enough for us to even be in any kind of contention for prize money at all.  So for the most part our competition is over.  But that is fine we have a bunch of fun coming. 

Now to find a good place to land.  On our trips to and from the balloon field we saw many places to land along the highway.  So since I had the steerage to parallel the highway I looked ahead down the highway and spotted a large field by an area that looked like a large shopping mall.  I told the crew over the radio to go to this spot and I would land there.  Karen the mother of the two kids on board with me kept asking Christina, where are they?  Shouldn't we be following them?  How do you know where he is going?  How are we going to find them?  Christina, bless her heart, just said we are going where Jeff told us to go and he will land there.  Karen was very impressed that we could tell them 30 minutes ahead of time where we were going to land.

We came in and set the balloon right at their feet!  We packed up and had our champagne and gave both Chris and Shelby first flight certificates with photos of HIZAZOV.

We went back to the main field and dropped off our happy crew, refueled the balloon, Then went out for something to eat.  We wanted to go to Pizza Hut but it was only 8:30 in the morning and pizza hut was not open so we did cracker barrel.  We then went back out to the main field and did a little shopping and decided to put up the TABT!  We found a spot up by the info booth so we had a great volume of people coming by to ask questions.  We played Frisbee with Maggie and then sat under our tent to enjoy the afternoon.  It was so hot!  We found out later that the heat index was 107 and there was almost no breeze at all.  We were baking.  So we packed up our stuff and headed back out to the hotel for a little nap and some badly needed air conditioning.  Before we left I purchased shirts for each of us.  I had an idea!  Since we had been out in the heat we pretty much spoiled our uniform shirts so we needed something to wear for the evening glow.  We went back to the hotel got our nap then made our "Rally Shirts" we cut off the sleeves and then used a marker to write on them!  On my shirt I put Pilot on the front and then Flying HIZAZOV on the back.  The girls put Crew on the front of theirs and Chasing HIZAZOV on the back.  It was great fun back out at the field when people would ask and we explained.  The evening flight was supposed to be a glow for us but we had a huge thunderstorm just to our north so we sat to see what would happen.  As it turned out the storm hit right about the time we were supposed to put the balloons up.  We sat and watched the wind blow and then the rain come.  The girls took the time to go and do a little shopping.  They picked up some gifts for several people and got me the most wonderful plack.  they also brought back nachos and some drinks for me.

We headed back to the hotel for an evening of drinking games.  The girls picked up some Corona beer and little known to me they were feeding Maggie Mae candy!  They gave her some gummies and realized that the gummies were stuck between here teeth and every time she opened her mouth you could see the evidence that they had been feeding her stuff she should not have.  The were franticly rubbing her gums to get the gummies out so I would not notice.  Laughing their butts off trying to hide the evidence of what they had done. 

The girls t

Sunday

06/20/10