Hot Air Balloons Preparing For Lift-Off In Abingdon, VA

Every year, the last day of the Virginia Highlands Festival is kicked off bright and early by the launching of several beautiful hot air balloons, and every year I seem to miss out on the action except for seeing an occasional solitary balloon float by throughout the day. Well, this year I decided to get up with the chickens and head over to the Southwest Virginia 4-H Educational Center in Abingdon to watch the balloons take off.

When I got to the launch site, there were balloons lying everywhere, all stretched out in neat lines waiting for the inflation process to begin. Before long, the air was filled with the distinctive sound of flames being shot into the balloons' openings. Little by little they began to fill up with the hot air, expanding slowly but steadily as they began to take on the shape of a balloon.

Since I had never witnessed a mass hot air balloon launch before I didn't have a clue about how it would all unfold. I figured there would be an orderly lift-off of the balloons in some particular order, each one being released by a ground crew upon command. Wrong! They simply gently lifted off one-by-one as the hot air inside them finally made them lighter than the air around them. One would take off here, another there, until the last one finally left the ground and drifted away in pursuit of the others.

The start of this year's balloon rally was quite a remarkable thing to witness. The fundamentals of physics behind the process of inflating and flying a hot air balloon are very basic, yet the ability to successfully and safely pilot one takes a lot of practice and skill - as well as a lot of courage!

Well, this year's Virginia Highlands Festival has come and gone, but it went out with amazing patches of color painting the sky above the Abingdon area throughout the day. I think I'll get up early again next year to watch the balloons take off, and I'll probably take my granddaughter Olivia with me!

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