Mid-Life Crisis Travel Adventures: Up, Up and Away

We couldn’t have had a better send-off. Really. It was worth the limited amount of sleep before our 6:00 am next-day departure; worth the hour-long ride each way in the back seat on tiny, twisty roads; worth the mosquito bites; worth ignoring the backdrop of family drama, which I will spare you from sharing; worth using up my camera battery and space on my card for the videos; worth long conversations with the great-grandmas in their 90s whose long-departed logic I often have trouble deciphering, especially in a second language.

In French, a hot-air balloon is called une montgolfière, named after the brothers Montgolfier who designed the first one in 1782. The concept is simple, really; hot air rises, so if you heat air inside a container, called the envelope, it will rise. No special gas is needed, just air, a fan, a basket, a burner, a balloon, and some strong cables and ropes. The envelope—the balloon part—is made of a delicate nylon material, sewn in sections with double seams like those in your favorite pair of Levis. The balloon is extended on the ground, attached firmly to the basket, which is lying on its side. A gasoline-powered fan fills the envelope until it’s partially aloft, then the burner is turned on intermittently until the air inside becomes hot. The balloon eventually rises vertically, pulling the basket upright with it. It’s then ready for passengers. The pilot applies the burner gradually until the balloon rises off the ground. The balloon is then subject to the winds of chance, and the pilot is followed by a co-pilot on the ground, who chases after it like a storm-chaser. The trick, of course, is knowing when to allow the air in the envelope to cool so the balloon descends softly in a wide-open area free of trees and sharp things on the ground. Hot-air balloon pilots know to avoid things like recently harvested colza fields, for example; the plant which is the source of canola oil has sharp stalks which could easily pierce the delicate nylon.

My husband’s first cousin, Audrey, and her husband Sébastien built their own hot-air balloon, piecing it together in their small apartment in Toulouse. Somehow they found the time between Audrey’s job as a civil engineer and Sébastien’s aeronautical engineering work for Airbus, and raising two small daughters, to sew the envelope by hand. They bought the basket from Monsieur de Montgolfier, a direct descendant of the original inventors! Last week they took a well-deserved vacation by renting a gite—a small vacation rental home—in the Perche. They invited my in-laws and Gaël and me, Audrey’s two grandmothers, and Gaël’s cousin Aurélie to come for a cookout dinner and a demonstration of how they put the balloon in the air. We helped to attach ropes and hooks, and even though we were well-prepared by Sébastien, we all jumped with the noise and blast of the burner. Although it was too complicated to actually give us a ride, we got to see the whole process of how it goes up, and the kids went in the basket for a tiny lift-off at the end. We were lucky to have no wind and fairly cool evening temperatures, allowing a flawless show. Bravo to Audrey and Sébastien; their energy and passion for this sport was fabulous to watch.