MarkBarbieri
Semi-retired
- Joined
- Aug 20, 2006
This is a video we made on a hot air balloon ride near Lake Bled a few days ago. Watch it and try to figure out how it was filmed. I'll come back and explain later.
The flight was a lot of fun. That part of Slovenia is incredibly beautiful. The lake is overlooked by a castle on a cliff. It also features a church on an island in the lake. It's like a real-life fantasy setting. I went paragliding over the lake earlier in the week and that was also spectacular. It was our first time in Slovenia, but we loved it and will probably come back.
A few notes for anyone that hasn't gone up in a hot air balloon:
1) They are really quiet except when they aren't. When the burner is on, they are very loud. My estimate was that the burner ran for about 20-30% of the time.
2) It is not windy. Generally, balloons only fly when the wind is fairly low. And the balloon moves with the wind, so you hardly feel any wind at all.
3) While I'm not afraid of heights, I typically feel a little nervous standing at the edge of a canyon or tall building. Oddly, I don't get that sensation in a balloon. I'm not sure why.
4) Balloon landings can be very rough. Usually, the wind is low and the landings are gentle. But sometimes it is windy near the ground and you bounce and crash across the ground for a while before coming to a stop. Even though it was calm for our flight, our pilot had us crouch and hold on in a crash position just in case. We once landed in high winds in Colorado and it was rough.
5) The balloon ride was more than twice as expensive as the paragliding flight. That's because the ratio of ground crew to passengers is higher, because the equipment costs are higher, and because they can usually only do one balloon ride per morning. It was about $250/person for our flight.
6) From what I've seen, most balloons are set up to carry 6 or 12 people. On this flight, we were in a 6 person balloon. With a 12 person balloon, the basket is split into two sections, so you can't necessarily change sides to get a different view.
7) The pilot of a balloon has limited control. They can go up or down looking for wind moving in the direction they want. Sometimes that works and they can go where they want to go. Sometimes it doesn't and you either don't move much across the ground or you don't move in the direction you want. It's hard to predict, so any balloon ride is a bit of a gamble.