Balloons

Carolyn and I got up way to early yesterday to go see some hot air balloons rise over Boise.  Normally, I could care less, but a friend asked us over and it wasn't too much of an imposition.  Normally I get up around 7 AM, so to be somewhere on the other side of town by 7 AM just means getting up a little earlier.  Of course, had I gone to bed a little earlier, it wouldn't have been difficult to get up.

Our friend has a nice house up in the hills that commands a great view of the Treasure Valley.  The Fourth of July up there is great.  The view at his house comes from a "funny" story.  His neighbor uphill didn't blow out and shut off his water sprinklers in preparation for winter and the subsequent flooding destroyed a barrier wall between the properties.  My friend smartly had the property surveyed in prep for having to sue his neighbor and discovered that the destroyed property was actually land that belonged to him that the neighbor had essentially taken over as his own.

Once the damage was fixed my friend put a couple of terraces and a nice gazebo on his new property.  What was once his neighbor's great view was all along his own.  To think, if the neighbor just manned-up and fixed the damage he probably could have kept illegally using that land.

Anyway, the balloons rose up out of the park and we got to look and take pictures.

I cannot recall the exact place I heard this, but I believe it was on a friend's blog (http://www.blogography.com/), that you can tell how lame a state is by looking at the office state's webpage and seeing how many pages in you have to go to find hot air balloons.  I am proud to say that I couldn't find any hot air balloons on Idaho's website.  The only way I could get to balloons was to actually type "hot air" in the search engine, which just looked for "hot air idaho" and put the Google results on the page.

We sometimes get hot air balloon crews lifting off from the Western Idaho Fairgrounds just South of the house.  They usually drift such that we cannot see them, but a couple of weeks ago one came very low over the house.  I snapped a few pics while I was tending to what passes for our garden.

The guy really turned on the gas, which I found quite loud.  After I was done watering the garden I went out the front of the house and snapped a few pics before it got too high.