Having a Ball(oon)

Our first morning waking up in Napa Valley was an early one. We got up before sunrise to take a hot air balloon ride over wine country.

After meeting at a local bakery (along with a few dozen other tourists), we were shuttled to a field 20 minutes outside town. There, three balloons were already being prepped to take the lot of us up into the morning sky. There were many surprises in store for this experience, with the first being just how large the passenger baskets of these balloons actually were. Each balloon could carry up to 22 people (and would carry 16 apiece that day). But you weren't just herded in together as one big group. The pilot had his own channel through the center, while each of the four corners was subdivided. My husband and I and our friends got one corner to ourselves, climbing in to wait for the air in the balloon to heat up enough for flight.

Flying in a hot air balloon is more tranquil than you'd ever imagine. The moment of liftoff is slow and gentle; the basket just softly rises as at first you lift up at about the pace of an escalator. The flight itself is serene, with the only disruption being the occasional blast of the burner.

It's hard for me to speculate how someone with an intense fear of heights would react, but if you're prone to more run-of-the-mill vertigo, a balloon flight will hardly trigger it at all. This isn't like going to the top of a tall skyscraper, where you ride up in an ultra-fast elevator and are suddenly looking out from a great height. You gradually rise and gradually sink, hardly aware of your movements. It barely feels like you've left the ground. The most noticeable motion is the gentle rotation of the basket, completely under the control of the pilot as they spin the balloon to give the passengers different views along the way. And that basket, by the way, comes high up to your chest -- it doesn't feel particularly uncomfortable to stand near the edge.

The views are breathtaking. Pretty much anywhere that it's worth sending up one hot air balloon, you'll see dozens. Every morning in Napa, the sky fills with them. We took off from a more central location, but there were clusters north and south of us -- the southern ones popping up one by one through the top of a slow-moving morning fog bank.

Our pilot demonstrated his experience and skills by giving us a peaceful one-hour flight. The other pilots in our group were more flashy, "climbing" up a hillside at an altitude of no more than 20 feet, or almost brushing each other as they moved straight up-and-down alongside in close proximity -- putting on a fun show.

Touchdown was almost as gentle as the liftoff. Our basket scraped the upper branches of a tall tree as we came in to an empty field of a local vineyard, then softly bounced a few times before coming to a rest. We'd been cautioned beforehand to brace ourselves during the landing, but it wouldn't have been necessary. The balloon simply bounced off the ground like an astronaut skipping on the moon.

And this was only the start of our morning! We actually had the busiest day of our whole trip still ahead, but it had begun with a truly memorable experience.