Hot Air Balloon Ride: "Iffy" Weather Made Things Especially Magical

My husband Jeff watching as crews inflate our hot air balloon Sunday
for our trip over parts of northwestern Vermont. 

My perfect husband gifted me yesterday with a trip on a hot air balloon with him over exceptionally scenic northwestern Vermont.

It was an absolutely spectacular way to celebrate my birthday, our wedding anniversary and his retirement.

It was magical and it is another reason why I will be forever grateful to him for all sorts of reasons. The balloon ride was another big item off my bucket list.

This is of course a weather and climate blog, so I'll get into that stuff, too, while describing this wonderful trip.

The balloon excursion was run by Above Reality Hot Air Balloon Rides based in Essex, Vermont.

Light through the clouds during our balloon trip Sunday over
northwestern Vermont. 

We were supposed to go last Sunday, but winds were too strong and out of a direction that would have made safely landing almost impossible.  So we went yesterday.

On our way to Essex, I was dismayed to see the sky had become gray and overcast, and a few raindrops splattered onto the windshield.

Would the trip be canceled again? Or would the weather make this a less-than-ideal experience?  Well, I would find out

Eight people, including Jeff and me, had booked Sunday's excursion.  They balloon company wanted us to land somewhere close to where their base in Essex is.  So we piled into a van and drove about 12 miles northwest to Milton.

The slightest breeze was blowing from the northwest, so they figured the wind would take us back to somewhere near Essex.

A bit of fall color in the trees as viewed from our hot air balloon over
northwestern Vermont Sunday

When we got to the field in Milton, the balloon people were already setting up.

The guy running the show was named Jeff, like my husband.  To avoid confusion, I'll refer to this guy as Pilot Jeff.

It started to sprinkle again while they were inflating the balloon and the sky looked darker. I mentioned I was a weather geek.

Pilot Jeff consulted aviation weather and radar and I checked in with the National Weather Service/Burlington web site. Then Pilot Jeff and I compared notes.

At first glance, things looked grim. Radar was totally lit up with blues and greens, indicated a fairly widespread light rain, which might interfere with things.

However, the air was also dry. Most of the precipitation being picked up by radar was virga, which is rain that evaporates before hitting the ground. Even better, a pocket of even drier air loomed just to our west and it was moving in.

A brook zigzagging through the northwestern Vermont landscape
as seen from our hot air balloon trip Sunday. 

Additionally, these were flat stratus clouds, not the billowing tall clouds that can produce lightning.

A risk of lightning would have scrubbed the flight, but Pilot Jeff and I agreed the weather conditions would not produce any electricity. The sprinkles stopped and the flight was on!

Pilot Jeff acknowledged that people might be disappointed by the clouds, but they would result in better photographs. No harsh shadows, and no washing out of images from camera lenses pointed at the sun. This would be great, he assured us.

And Pilot Jeff was right. I mentioned the air was dry, despite the cloud layer. This meant there was basically no haze. We lifted off, and soon we were about 2,000 feet over Milton.

The air was so free of haze that we could clearly see Mount Royal in the middle of Montreal. The sun was out in Montreal, and we could see the sunlight glinting off downtown skyscrapers. Montreal is about 80 miles northwest of Milton, so that's impressive. We could even see the Laurentian Mountains northeast of Montreal. That was really impressive!

To the west, the light winds coming up and over the Adirondacks caused a bit of sinking air on the western side of Lake Champlain. That opened up holes in the clouds, and beautiful light came through and lit up the lake and its western shore.

Exposed old dead tree roots in a marsh, as viewed from overhead
during our hot air balloon excursion on Sunday.

We saw a beautiful display of what are known as crepuscular rays, which are alternate beams of sunlight and darker hues.  The rays are caused by the sun hitting a few specs of dust or particles in the atmosphere.  The rays looked like a whole bunch of Hollywood spotlights to me.

The wind direction gave us a perfect flight path.  It was almost exclusively over wilderness and we didn't go over many neighborhoods. It was all forest, streams, marshes, bogs and beaver ponds. Just spectacular.

Even better, the wind was extremely light. Which meant our forward motion was very slow. We could linger on any particular view. It was really meditative. The bursts of the flame to keep the balloon aloft was white noise which actually helped that wonderful, peaceful mood.

Pilot Jeff, always enthusiastic, couldn't stop remarking about how much early fall color there was in the forests. Unlike recent Septembers, this one has been relatively cool in Vermont. The color was a little earlier than the past few years.  The forests were still mostly green, but there were beautiful pockets of orange and purple and yellow.

At one point, Pilot Jeff deliberately had the basket of our balloon scrape the tree tops. A fellow passenger grabbed a perfect orange autumn sugar maple leaf as a momento.

One couple in particular loved the cool air. They had fled Atlanta, which has been hotter and more humid than their usual oppressive standards this summer and September. Bundled up in jackets, you can see the pair just oozing relief at feeling cool air for the first time in months. Of course, it's all perspective. The temperature was in the 60s, which to me seemed pretty mild. Go figure.

We finally touched down in a lovely green field next to a beautiful old brick farmhouse somewhere near the Westford/Essex town line.

We were given Champagne to celebrate.  But I was of course sad to see the excursion end. I wanted to have it go on forever.  Thank you husband Jeff, for this beautiful experience.

Love you!!