On April 25, we celebrated SEVEN years of marriage!  Crazy, right?  I can honestly say, it’s been an amazing seven years and it has flown by.  I feel so blessed that I get to spend my life with my best friend.  There’s honestly, nothing better in the world.  Our wedding was one of the best days of our lives and not just because it was an awesome party, but because it was the start of our incredible journey as husband and wife.  I wouldn’t change a minute of these last seven years and I can’t wait to see what our future together holds.  I love you Babe!  Okay, enough mushy stuff – let’s get back to our adventure!

For the last couple of years, we’ve been shooting weddings on our anniversary.  This year we actually had the weekend mostly free so I wanted to celebrate by doing something really fun and different.  Ryan’s 101 in 1001 list ended up being the prefect resource for some fun ideas :-)  I’m all about killing two birds with one stone so I decided to surprise him with a Hot Air Balloon Ride (which also happens to be #89 on his list)! YAY!  I love anniversary adventures!

For those of you that know us well, you know that we are NOT morning people.  We’re both total night owls (Ryan especially) so when my alarm went off at 4:00am that morning I actually discovered that he hadn’t even gone to bed yet.  Whoops.  He was pretty confused when I told him he had to get ready and that we had somewhere to be in half an hour.  (And I did promise him a nap when we got home from our surprise adventure.)  A short 30 minutes later, we arrived at the very dark and deserted Chandler Municipal airport.  I seem to remember him making a few jokes about me taking him out into the middle of nowhere to kill him. LOL!  As soon as the truck with the giant hot air balloon basket in tow showed up he pretty much had it figured out :-)  We ended up sharing our Hot Air Balloon adventure with one one other super sweet couple who were also celebrating an anniversary!  It was pretty perfect.

Our balloon driver Shane and his assistant drove us all out to a dirt lot behind a little church to prepare for launch.  Here’s how things started out:

The guys helped hold open the balloon so they could start to inflate it using a big, high powered fan.  Ryan was clearly hard at work . . . . taking photos on his iPhone :-)

Once they turned the burners on it filled up pretty fast.  All aboard!

Loved the view of gorgeous colors looking up into the balloon.

The sun was just starting to rise as we lifted off.  The views were pretty spectacular.  We climbed up to about 5,000 feet.  I thought I would be a little freaked out by how high we were, but I totally wasn’t.  The ride was so gentle and calm – it was actually kind of surreal.

Shane brought along a couple of fun flying “props” for each of us to try!

Wonder where they ended up after such a long  journey back to earth?

My little parachute man got stuck in the ropes, but he managed to get himself free eventually and float out to freedom.

Our fellow balloon passengers were kind enough to snap a quick photo of us.  And yes, there’s a reason we look kinda sleepy – we WERE!

This twistable handle is how the driver controls the bursts of heat that go up into the balloon.  The one thing I never realized is that the fire only controls how high you go.  There’s no way to control your direction – you just have to go where the wind takes you.  As you can imagine, this can make landing a bit of a challenge.  You really do have to know what you’re doing and be able to improvise with whatever comes you way.  Our driver was kind enough to let each of us do a little “driving.”  It felt pretty cool to have that much “fire power” at your fingertips.

More gorgeous Arizona views.

I LOVE that you can see our shadow in this shot :-)  It’s hard to tell from the photo, but we actually flew really close over the tops of houses towards the end of the ride when we were looking for places to land.  It was really fun to watch all the little kids and their parents run out into their backyards and wave to us.  We were literally close enough to talk to them.  It was pretty fun stuff.

We ended up landing in a large green belt in a neighborhood.  At the start of the ride, Shane explained that there were three different kinds of landings in Hot Air Ballooning #1) the basket touches down gently and comes to a stop, #2) it touches down and bounces a couple times due to the wind picking up the balloon, or #3) the basket hits the ground, falls over and you get dragged until it stops.  At the very beginning of the ride he warned us that it was kinda windy out and we could be in for a #3.  We were all totally game for it though, other than my slight fear of crushing our camera.  But hey, that’s why we have insurance right?  LOL!  As we approached the grass all of us started chanting “Number Three! Number Three!” to psych ourselves up for what was ahead.  In case you’re wondering, we ended up with a pretty gentle #2 :-)

When the balloon set down, we all took our shoes off and “walked” the air out of it.  Kinda reminded me of parachute games in elementary school gym class!

After the balloon was mostly deflated, we were treated to a champagne toast and yummy breakfast treats (which I was enjoying too much to take pictures of apparently.)  Overall, it couldn’t have been a better experience :-)  We had such a wonderful time and walked away with amazingly fun memories!  If you’re looking for a unique experience, definitely check out Aerogelic Ballooning.  They took such good care of us and made our anniversary so special.  I guess now the hard part will be figuring out how to top this next year!