Hot Air Balloon Flight Record - 18-21Jul2003
Greenriver Festival

This turned out to be another odd weather weekend. About 1PM on Friday, we are in NW Rhode Island, driving to Greenfield. We got hit with a serious thunderstorm that created rivers running down the side of the road and hail. By the time we arrived in Greenfield we had driven into clear sky and dry ground!

Friday night we had a nice flight north of the field (wait, didn't FSS say something about ESE???). Two balloons that didn't fly had a mini balloon glow while the rest of us returned.

Saturday morning provided a thin ground fog on the field when we first arrived, but it burned off before we started to inflate. Winds aloft were from WNW and the ground level was from the E toward the warming ridge. We were able to fly a spiral path south down the valley and land at the turf farm.

Saturday evening we had no ground wind from the E so we flew ESE across Greenfield, over the ridge, across the Deerfield River, along the railway switch yard, across the Connecticut River, and finally into an open field in the middle of the trees beside the railroad tracks. Nice flight, but by the time we finished we were too late for our dinner reservations.

Sunday morning was very light and we had a Hare and Hound competition. The hare looped around and made it back to the launch site. We spent a lot of time trying to get south without going east, and finally gave up. Popped up and moved out to the "swimming hole" where we had a very wide target for landing.

It was another great year at Greenfield.