Bow Tie o’ the Day didn’t get apprehensive or nauseous on our balloon ride this morning. Yesterday’s rain was nowhere in sight, so we drove just a bit north of Albuquerque to Rainbow Ryders. They had not lost my flight reservation, so it was all thumbs up for me to levitate in a basket with a dozen strangers– at 7AM.
Now you might think that for me, choosing the exact right bow tie for the outing would be the most important thing. Normally, that is true for most of the things I do and the places I go. But no! This morning the most important preparation I had to make with more-than-the-usual great care was to use an entire tube of Fixodent to glue in my dentures extra snuggly. I mean– if you lose those things from a thousand feet in the air, you ain’t gettin’ ’em back. It would certainly make for a wild story and a host of amusing photos, but gee… that’s pushing my loud life over the boundaries. And my wallet wouldn’t be happy about it either. I cannot abide buying things I already have.
It was a tight fit for us peeps in the basket. It wasn’t uncomfortable, but I was glad most of the group used deodorant and had brushed their teeth before they showed up and climbed in.
Bow Tie actually helped break the uncomfortable-ness of being a group of strangers. Bow Tie became a focal point of comments, which broke the ice. And a couple of women asked for TIE O’ THE DAY’s web address– because of how much they adored Bow Tie.
And even though I asked her if she wanted to go, Suzanne did not decide to go with me at the last minute. And I knew she wouldn’t. In fact, I am grateful she didn’t try to go. I was just being polite when I asked her to accompany me. See, Suzanne has this motion sickness issue. She is The Queen o’ Motion Sickness. It would not have been pretty. She’s such a queasy gal that the fact the ride was so smooth it felt as if we weren’t moving wouldn’t have mattered. And it was smoooooth. We Bucket-list-checker-offers were six feet off the ground before I realized we had begun our ascent.
Kris, our balloon pilot, maneuvered us down to a mere two feet above the Rio Grande. And then he took us up over trees on the banks almost immediately–barely scraping the trees’ highest leaves. Terrifying in a fun way. Still, it was smooth sailing.
When you land, you feel it. Not hard, but you know you’ve touched down. Kris recommended we sorta bend our legs at touch-down to soften it a bit. He also said touching-down with straight legs has occasionally snapped a leg bone or two. Bend our legs at the knee, we all did.
And to wrap things up, we all got a certificate for surviving our ballooning. And Kris poured us all a glass of Champagne to toast our accomplishment. Guess who couldn’t drink. I looked at it, smelled it, listened to its bubbles. Then I dumped it and drank my Diet Coke. Pilot Kris looked at me knowingly and said, “I’ve got 15 years sober. How many do you have?” I told him I’ve got 11. How did he know, when I hadn’t said a thing about being an alcoholic? Do we all look alike to each other? I have a theory: I’ve heard of radar and gay-dar. And, apparently, there’s drunk-dar.
