Eyes To The Skies

Ann and I, and Mary and Dave went to the Lisle Eyes To The Skies Festival on July 3rd. It is the typical festival with carnival rides, local bands, corn dogs and pulled pork sandwiches. What it has that is different than the twenty or so other village festivals over the Independence Day weekend in the Chicago area is this:   

 

Yep, a balloon launching. And not just one.    

The nice thing was that you were allowed to wander around the balloon field while the balloons were setting up. People were eager to answer questions like how much does it cost (balloons can run as much as $45,000 each) and how much training do you need to pilot the balloon (10 to 14 months and it costs about $6840 to get trained)? But it might be worth it to have a balloon that looks like this at night when you light it up. I think I would like the one that looked like the globe. Although the penguin was neat, too.    

 

We had a great time and are already talking about going to the big balloon fest in Albuquerque, New Mexico sometime. Sounds like an RV road trip to me. Woooooo!