Balloons!

We arrived in Albuquerque Thursday evening and met up with our friends from CT who were staying at a hotel in town. They were there as lemonade/food vendors for New Mexico's annual Hot Air Balloon Festival. They had just gotten back from a hike up one of the nearby mountains,, and Jay had taken a tumble... and landed in a cactus! So they were all getting ready to settle in for the night & picking thorns out of Jay's hands and feet! We ordered some pizzas for dinner, and it was shocking how impossible it was to find anywhere that would a) deliver, and b) would make a buffalo chicken pizza! so we ended up driving to pick up our pizzas and the closest we could get to what we wanted was a chicken & bacon pizza and a spinach & garlic pizza...

Friday morning we woke up and the lemon crew went to finish setting up their stand, and we headed to the Rio Grande Nature Park. It was a nice day for a nature walk, and we got to sit on the side of the Rio Grande and listen to the quiet sounds of nature, even though we were walking distance from the city. After the walk, we headed to Starbucks for an afternoon pick-me-up and some quality internet time, and then headed back to the hotel room to hang with the crew and get to sleep early.

Saturday morning we woke up at 3:45am and got ready to attend the sunrise opening ceremony and mass ascension, aka hundreds of hot air balloons being sent off into the sky! Sunrise was at 7:00am and as the sky became lighter, we were able to watch as hundreds of balloons began to inflate and then lift off into the sky. It took 2 hours or maybe even a little more for all of the balloons to leave the ground, and it was a.truly amazing experience to watch it all happen!

After the balloons were all gone out of sight, we walked around the festival grounds to check out all the merchandise and food vendors, since the next scheduled event wasn't until 5:30pm! Somehow we kept ourselves occupied, including a trip to the store to purchase loads of glow sticks for the fireworks show which would be the grand finale for.the evening... However, around 4:00pm, some very heavy, dark, and very angry looking clouds began rolling in, and the winds began picking up. They had to cancel the twilight "twinkle glow"- where all of the balloons would be lit up and floating in the darkening sky, and it wasn't looking good for the fireworks. Finally, at about 7:00pm, just after the sun went behind the mountains, and over an hour ahead of schedule, the fireworks started! it was clearly not the show that had been planned, but rather a grand finale that lasted about 15 minutes, because the wind kept picking up and it seemed like they were trying to get the show in before the storm started. It was actually pretty cool, because the fireworks were battling with the lighting!

As soon as the show was over, there was a mad dash for the parking lot, so we headed over to the lemon to hang out with Jay & the crew until the lines to get out cleared up a little... Then back to the hotel! It was still pretty early, so we decided to go out, but we didn't know where to go, so we searched Albuquerque nightlife online, and the first search result was for Graham's Central Station! Apparently these club warehouses are all over the Midwest! So we convinced Jay to let one of the girls have the next day off so she could come out with us, and then got ready to go out while everyone else got ready for bed and another early morning...

By the time we arrived at the club, we were at peak pregame condition, and so the fun began immediately! We hopped from room to room, running and dancing through like mischievous fairies, staying in each place long enough to entertain the people on the dance floor, and then leaving before we could be approached. We even hit up the karaoke room, where Heather rocked out to the Britney Spears version of "I Love Rock'N'Roll", and the dj did the 'watermelon crawl' on the floor in silk pajamas and bunny ears! Overall, it was a very fun, exhilarating, exciting, outrageous evening!

The club closed at 2am so we caught a cab back to the hotel, but when we slid the key into the door, we found that someone had latched the security bolt, so we couldn't get in! Jay had told us not to come back until 3:30 because that's when everyone would be getting up, but we didn't think he was that serious about it! So we killed an hour and a half in the jeep, bs'ing about random nothingness and sobering up until 3:30am when we could finally lay our weary, danced-off butts down. Unfortunately, even though we waited to come back until we were told, nobody in the room was too eager to see us back, as lively as we still were, and so there was a little drama among a few of the crew members, but it seemed to clear itself up throughout the day. We spent most of the day Sunday sleeping off the remnants of the previous night, and finally got up around 3:00pm to get something to eat at IHOP! We didn't do much else until the crew came back from the lemon, and then we began packing up and getting ready to leave for the grand canyon... Our plan was to drive thru the night, arrive at the canyon koa kampground early in the morning, grab a few hours of sleep, and then hike the canyon in the afternoon... So we were back on the road around 1:30am!

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