{"id":511,"date":"2012-09-02T23:49:22","date_gmt":"2012-09-02T23:49:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.brendanmyers.net\/blog\/?p=511"},"modified":"2012-09-02T23:57:30","modified_gmt":"2012-09-02T23:57:30","slug":"the-man-who-catches-falling-hot-air-baloons","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.brendanmyers.net\/blog\/2012\/09\/the-man-who-catches-falling-hot-air-baloons\/","title":{"rendered":"The man who catches falling hot-air baloons"},"content":{"rendered":"

Most days, when it’s late afternoon and the sun has got down to an angle to where it shines right in my face when I’m sitting at my desk, I go for a walk in the woods. I have a semi-regular route that is about 11 kms long and takes me an hour and 45 minutes to walk it, more or less. Today, when I emerged from the woods, at the end of my walk, this is the sight that faced me:
\n\"baloons
\nAnd that shot captures less than half as many as were in the sky at the time. It was a surprisingly beautiful sight!
\nThese balloons were part of Gatineau’s annual Montgolfier Festival<\/a>. (Dear Ottawa folks: there’s a lot of cool stuff on this side of the river. And it’s closer to downtown than Westboro. Just saying.) And so I stood around for a while to watch them pass. It was really quite delightful, and did much to raise my spirits on a day when I had been feeling rather blue. I’ve never been in one of these before, and I wondered what it would be like. <\/p>\n

This one got really close, and was falling rather rapidly:
\n\"baloon
\nI could see the flames of the gas burner clearly and loudly, and see the people on board shouting something in French at me. Because I am a (mostly) unilingual anglophone, I shouted back the most useful French sentence I knew: “Je ne parlez pas Francais”. So someone else on the baloon shouted in English, “Catch us!” They needed some extra weight to slow them down. So I sprinted as fast as I could – not easy for me, since I injured my ankle rather badly a few years ago – and jumped on the side. The breeze still blew the balloon all the way across a parking lot, and tipped it on its side. So I ended up riding on “top”. But the balloon stopped before crashing into anything. I got off when the balloon was flat, and then I shook the pilot’s hand and went back home.<\/p>\n

I have to say, that was perhaps the most fun thirty seconds of my summer. Next year’s festival, maybe I’ll take a longer ride than just across the parking lot.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Most days, when it’s late afternoon and the sun has got down to an angle to where it shines right in my face when I’m sitting at my desk, I go for a walk in the woods. I have a … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.brendanmyers.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/511"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.brendanmyers.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.brendanmyers.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.brendanmyers.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.brendanmyers.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=511"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.brendanmyers.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/511\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.brendanmyers.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=511"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.brendanmyers.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=511"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.brendanmyers.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=511"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}