Bristol Balloon Fiesta 2004

Its August again, and in Bristol that can only mean one thing - 3 hour long queues to get into the fiesta car park. The weather was great this year, with mass ascents on Friday morning, Saturday morning and evening, and Sunday morning. There were some new special shapes and some of the old favourites, in all around 110 balloons took part.

We went over for the Saturday morning launch, and again for the Saturday evening launch and the night glow.



More photos can be seen here, and all the BBC coverage and news can be found here.

New Addition

Well, I know it has nothing to do with balloons, but I felt I had to add a comment about the latest addition to the Purcell Family! At around 7.30pm on Saturday 19th June 2004, Marcus John was born, weighing 7lb 14.5oz



Awwwwww!

More photos can be seen here.

Cathy's Birthday

Its Cathy's Birthday on Thursday, so we took her flying with Philip this weekend. She took my camera up in the balloon, and the results can be seen here : Cathy's Photos

The car you can see in the middle of photo 14 is us, trying to keep up with the balloon!

Playing with gifs....

Flying from Streatley

Yesterday Robert and I went flying with Jane and Philip again. We drove over to Streatley, and flew from there. This time I got a chance to fly! Yay!

As we took off I looked back at the launch field. If you look closely you can see Rob and Jane walking around the car.




This is a view over Streatley fairly soon after we took off:



A glider flew straight underneath us, and though I didn't have enough time to focus the camera I clicked anyway:



Jane has a "thing" about balloon shadows, but you don't get very good photos at high altitudes. You have to wait until you almost landing to get good ones.




The landing was fairly bumpy, and the balloon ended up lying on its side, with us upside down in the basket!

BBC Photo

I sent a photo from the Bath fesitval to the BBC news site, and they published it!

Look at picture 4

Bath Ballon Festival

Today we went to Peasedown St John, Somerset, to crew for Jane and Philip in the Bath Balloon Festival. Its quite a small event, and on the Friday night there were mostly small, privately owned balloons, none of the big corporate special shapes. There were a few rides balloons though.

Here is someone else launching, just before Kodasnap was ready to go



Kodasnap is a very photogenic balloon! As you can see, I wasn't flying this time (its hard to take photos of the balloon and fly at the same time!), so had the chance to get some lovely snaps of Kodasnap as they launched.




The flight was quite slow, and we managed to keep up fairly well, so were able to stop and watch as Philip practised flying low and level over a field. Another good photo opportunity.