Hot Air Balloon Festival

In October we drove three and a half hours north to Albuquerque for the annual Hot Air Balloon Festival.  We hoped to also visit the temple while there but devastatingly we discovered the night before we left that our temple recommends had expired in September.  We still visited the temple grounds.

Here the kids are enjoying the temple gardens.

The temple from a different perspective where you can see the Angel Moroni on top.

We then went to the Nature and Science Museum.

It was a really awesome museum with many interesting exhibits.

There's a T-rex in the entryway!

 And many more dinosaurs to see in their prehistoric exhibit

Even under the sea dinosaurs.  Christian loved running around everywhere.  Melody was content to ride.

Momma dino with her babies.

We had a lot of fun exploring!

They also had rock and caves exhibits (designed to look like you were walking through caves) which we found interesting because we had been to few caves recently!  The rocks and precious stones were impressive too.

After the museum we picked up some groceries for dinner and checked into our Airbnb and had an early night because we had to wake up very early the next morning.  Very early the next morning we parked and had to be shuttled to the location of the festival.  The bus ride took a lot longer than we anticipated because of the traffic but we still arrived in time to see the balloon glow.  Here Andrew is surprised to see all the flames. 

Sylvia saw me writing the blog and remembered how cold it was before the sun came up.

Jets doing a fly over

There were hundreds of balloons and it really was spectacular to watch.

They didn't all go up at once, so we were able to see the whole process of them laying out the balloon and slowly filling it with hot air and then taking off.

The elaborate designs of the balloons were unlike anything we had ever seen before.

Then the sun came up!

In this picture Sylvia is complaining about the cold and Andrew is looking at the pictures he took of the spider balloon and Melody is just staying warm by snuggling Daddy.

Christian stayed warm by borrowing Sister's sweatshirt.  He is happy to be there.

So colorful!

It was really amazing.

More balloon designs.

Once we had been there for a couple of hours we started getting in line to shuttle back to our vehicle.  We could still watch the balloons while we waited and we even stopped by a vender for some warm  doughnut holes.

As we drove away many of the early takeoff balloons were starting to land.  This Yoda balloon was landing and we thought it was one of the cooler designs.  Some other character balloons we saw were a pig, a princess elephant, Vincent Van Gogh, a seal, and the Bimbo bear.

We are really glad we could experience the Albuquerque Hot Air Balloon Festival