new mexico | albuquerque international balloon fiesta

Oh, the Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta. With 600 hot air balloons, it's the largest balloon festival in the world, and photographing this event has been on my Life List for ages. Imagine the awesome photos you could take at an event like this! And what incredible luck that the annual fiesta just happened to be occurring the weekend after Larry's business trip to New Mexico.

Unfortunately, that is where my luck ended. The Balloon Fiesta may have been the biggest travel disappointment of my life. But let me start from the beginning:

We woke up at 3:45 am to drive from Santa Fe to Albuquerque. Yes, 3:45 am. Evidently I am even more dedicated to sacrificing my sleep and mental well-being for hot air balloons than for sunrises. (Though, bonus - I got to see the sunrise, too. Spoiler alert: that's pretty much all I got to see.) Once in Albuquerque, we waited in the dark in a mega line to get tickets and for the shuttle bus to take us to the fiesta grounds.

The shuttle bus was a school bus. Haven't ridden one of those in almost 20 years! Not only was it a school bus, but it was a school bus full of teenage girls wearing sweatpants and giggling. Flashback to high school, except Larry and I felt like the uncool parents. Yikes.

We arrived at the fiesta grounds and it was packed. Pitch black out and I've never seen so many people in my life.  By 6 am, the midway was packed with 100,000 people eating breakfast burritos and cinnamon rolls. It was like attending a carnival in the middle of the night. So bizarre.





We arrived in the middle of the night so we could see the Morning Glow (the balloons inflate and light up while sitting on the ground) and the Mass Ascension (all the balloon take flight!). We wandered the grounds as the crews prepped their balloons and the sun came up and I tried to scope out the best location for taking photos. It was looking to be a beautiful day with perfect weather - clear skies, the slightest of breezes, the sun shining...




But progress was slow. There seemed to be a delay that was preventing the balloons from inflating for the Morning Glow. The sun came up and not much was happening. But then finally, finally, some balloons started to inflate. Starting with the scary clown balloon. Happy Mardi Gras/sweet dreams:



Aaaaaannnd, that was as far as they got. Yup, that was it. After several weather delay announcements and waiting for hours, the Mass Ascension was cancelled. Yes, cancelled. What seemed like perfect weather to me was evidently just enough wind to make it dangerous for the balloons to take flight. Obviously, safety is the most important thing, but after getting up in the middle of the night to photograph something I'd been wanting to experience for years, it was a major disappointment. About half the balloons had inflated and sat on the ground so the hundreds of thousands of disappointed people would have something to look at, but then they started to deflate and shut the whole thing down. Such a bummer. Luckily enough time has passed at this point, that it's just a semi-funny story, but at the time I felt like a kid who woke up on Christmas only to find that Santa hadn't come.

We quickly grabbed a few pics of our favorite balloons (Yoda and Elvis) to prove that we were there:



And yes, we could've come back for the evening's activities and hoped that the weather conditions would change and the balloons would be able to ascend later in the day. But that was hours away and would've involved either finding somewhere to sit around in Albuquerque for ten hours, or driving back and forth to Santa Fe (an hour away), trying to find parking again, paying for parking/tickets/shuttle service again, etc - all without the guarantee that they would be able to take off.  (Turns out the weather did clear up and they did ascend that night. And yes, I did experience slight rage when I checked out all the photos on Instagram of hundreds of balloons taking flight.) But at the time, it didn't seem worth the risk or the time commitment, so we decided to cut our loses and try to recover what we could of the rest of the day...

life list #29a: see a mountain goat in the wild

Are you mocking me, Goat?

It's been a long time since I wrote a Life List post, but as I was scrolling through my list of all the things I wanted (or thought I wanted) to do with my life since 2006, I realized I've checked off quite a few items in the last year. (I also realized it's time to revisit that list - there is some hilarious stuff on there and it might be time for an update!)

Anyway, I've been on the quest to see a mountain goat or a bighorn sheep in the wild since Larry and I first visited Colorado together in 2005. We've been to numerous national parks together and time after time, these creatures have evaded me. FOR NINE YEARS. It's become almost comical.

On my fourth trip to Colorado in July, I finally saw and photographed the elusive mountain goat on Mount Evans. With a summit at over 14,000 feet, Mount Evans is the highest paved road in North America, and my friend Sarah, who lives in Denver, assured me that every time she's been up Mount Evans she has seen mountain goats. Ah, but you haven't tried to see mountain goats with me, Sarah. Something *will* go wrong...

(Told you so!)

Looking for goats? Pondering the meaning of the universe? Appreciating the awesome beauty of the natural world? 
Nope, she was intrigued by that drainage culvert.

Our expedition to see the goats actually took two attempts over a span of two days. There were originally six of us who started out on this adventure, but due to flat tires and other mishaps, only three of us made it to the top. (The girls, obviously!)

It was worth it. Mount Evans was beautiful. And I FINALLY saw a goat. Not just one goat, but LOTS of goats, including the jerk who stuck his tongue out at me. Also, BABY GOATS.











My nine year quest to see a mountain goat is finally over. Life List #29: Finally see an elusive mountain goat or bighorn sheep in the wild. Take its picture. Check...

But I'm still searching for that blasted bighorn sheep!

kentucky road trip

Bourbon and horses and dinosaurs, oh my! Two couples, five days, 1725 miles to Kentucky and back...

So, why did we do this? The plan was hatched in late August over drinks with our friend Jonathan and his girlfriend. At the end of the summer, Jonathan got exciting news from Maker's Mark Distillery: his barrel of bourbon was ready! The marketing geniuses at the historic Kentucky distillery came up with an ambassador program and when you sign up, your name is put on a barrel of bourbon. The bourbon ages for seven(ish) years, and when it's ready you receive an invitation to come to Loretto, Kentucky to tour the distillery and buy two bottles of bourbon from "your" barrel, which you get to label and dip in wax yourself. Genius, right? And we were totally game.

Our itinerary also included two nights in Cave City so we could visit Mammoth Cave National Park, a drive north along the Kentucky Bourbon Trail, and two more nights in Louisville. Unfortunately, our trip was during the federal government shutdown, so the park was closed (lame!), but we found other activities to keep us occupied.

Wop wop.

A summary of our trip, in bullets and photos:

+ We slept in wigwams! Ok, they weren't actually wigwams, they were teepees. Ok, they weren't actually teepees either, since they were made of concrete. But at $55 a night, and with an awesome neon sign out front, Wigwam Village #2 in Cave City was a piece of roadside Americana that was too good to pass up. Plus, I love unique hotels and sleeping in a teepee was on my Life List. This might have been a cheat, especially since the interior looked (and smelled) like dated 70's hotel room, but close enough. (Next up? Sleeping in a treehouse!)

+ We were frustrated to learn that the majority of Kentucky is dry. Dry as in YOU CAN'T BUY ALCOHOL THERE. What the wha? How can more than half the counties in the bourbon state be dry? (Or moist - which means the county is dry except for one city.) Let me just say that when you are staying in a $55 a night concrete wigwam-teepee, you need some freakin' beer. Solution: a 50 mile round trip drive to a liquor store in Bowling Green.

+ We went to Dinosaur World. Enormous, fake, garish, fiberglass dinosaurs - awesome! Also, I'm going to go ahead and cross "Visit Dinosaur Land" (in Virginia) off my list of local things to do, because I really only need to see one depressing theme park filled with enormous, fake, garish, fiberglass dinosaurs in this lifetime.

+ We toured a privately operated cave called Diamond Caverns since the national park was closed. I'm sure it was almost the same except...less mammoth...

+ We took a completely spontaneous trip to Nashville. (More on this later.)

+ The highlight of the trip: touring Maker's Mark Distillery and campus. We observed the many processes involved in manufacturing and aging bourbon from the fermented corn mash stage (it smells like bread baking!), to the rickhouses full of aging bourbon barrels, to the bottling plant where the bottles are labeled and dipped in their signature red wax. At the end of the tour we got to taste the bourbons and my teeth felt like they were on fire. Afterwards, Jonathan AKA "Mr. Ambassador" got to put the labels on his bottles (which were custom printed with his name on them) and got suited up in protective gear to dip them in hot wax. You can read Jonathan's account of the experience on his blog.

+ We stayed in the historic Brown Hotel in Louisville. We tasted their famed Hot Brown Sandwiches (overrated), and drank way too many Bourbon & Gingers (delicious) and Mint Juleps (surprisingly tasty) at the hotel bar. My teeth stopped burning and I actually started...liking...bourbon. (Uh oh.)

+ We visited the Kentucky Derby Museum and toured Churchill Downs. Larry and I found our namesake ponies - Street Shoes Larry and Rachel Alexandra. Morbid trivia from the tour: only the heads, hooves, and hearts of racehorses are buried.

+ We walked over the Clark Memorial Bridge and across the Ohio River into Indiana. We weren't so impressed with the town of Jeffersonville, but we sat outside and had a couple of drinks there while looking back across the river towards Louisville, so I'm totally counting it as visiting another new state.

+ We ate a lot of fast food on the road and dined at several fantastic restaurants in the cool NuLu neighborhood in Louisville: Delicious pizza at a cool gas-station-turned-restaurant called the Garage Bar and an amazing Sunday dinner at Rye, where the four of us managed to order and devour almost everything on the menu.