How did Tom get here?
Labor Day, 2004, I took a brief respite to visit Mom and Brother in Alpine, Texas. For basic "Decompression Therapy" purposes, I took a couple of bikes with me.
Arriving Wednesday before Labor Day, I went for a ride on my recumbent Thursday. Applying sun-block on all the appropriate areas for bike rides, I took off on the sunny Thursday morning to ride my favorite highway; Texas State Highway # 118 between Alpine and Fort Davis.
A nice 6-hour ride, out and back, but my normal "sun block" areas for a bike ride did not include my shins. Well, guess what? Your shins are almost always under your body shadow when riding an upright bike but they are almost always in the sun on a recumbent!
By dinner time Thursday night, I knew there would be no exposing my shins to the West Texas Sun for a few days and my Brother, Bill invited me to ride "shotgun" the next day with him. Bro' Bill is a HAM radio operator and the local club was "chasing" hot air balloons the next few days for Alpine's annual "Big Bend Balloon Bash".
Friday morning started early (no problem for a cyclist) and after the majority of the hot air balloons launched, we started "chasing" balloons North and East of the Alpine Airport (launching site). If you launch a hot air balloon from Alpine Texas's airport, 99.44% of the time you will land on a ranch owner's property. Our mission was to identify each ballon when it landed, radio HAM-central to patch us in to the property owner, gain permission to enter the property and escort the balloon's chase crew through the recovery process, observing the owner's wishes as to method.
We chased several balloons up a country road to the entry to a ranch on the South side of a canyon wall. Entry was delayed because all access was through a pen housing a few dozen calves. We had to wait for the arrival of the owner's (yes, Dorthy, they still exist ..... in West Texas, in the 21st century) cowboys to move the calves to another pasture and open the gates to allow us passage through the first pasture to the one where the balloons had landed.
After leading several balloon chase crews in to the pasture where their balloons had landed, we approached SunKissed, a balloon that looked like they could use some help before their crew arrived. After helping captain and owner, Ann Kirby, and crew secure SunKissed and help her and crew pack their craft,
Ann invited me to ride on the next morning's flight. I declined the ride the next morning, opting to "crew" for SunKissed while one of the regular members rode with Ann. Saturday's flight went off without a hitch and I was invited to join them in the "Balloon Glow" that evening in Alpine's high school stadium. Before we parted that evening I exchanged addresses and phone numbers with all of SunKissed's crew and promised to join them, two weeks later in Plano, Tx for Plano's Balloon Festival.