Something Strange in the Sky this Weekend

There were strange things aloft this weekend. They were brightly colored and flew as quietly as the clouds themselves. The Kopytek family was in the neighborhood and in a whirlwind visit they took us on two wonderful adventures. They are part of a hot air balloon team that was meeting in Midland and they dragged the old folks along with them to experience the sport. The gist of it is the balloonist lay a large X in the middle of a field that serves as a target then drive off madly in their chase vehicles through the countryside in a upwind direction to find a place to launch. This evening a random side street served as their Cape Canaveral. The teams erected and filled the giant envelopes with propane heated air and the pilots floated the airships back toward the X. As they passed over the target each tossed a weighted ribbon downward trying to plop it as close as they could in order to win the day.


Mrs. Kopytek lays open the envelope and tries not to get broasted in the process.





What a strange and beautiful pastime.

When all the hot air balloons had returned safely to the field that evening they celebrated with a "Glow."

This is our own geocache soon to be hidden deep in the woods

         As if ballooning wasn't enough the Kopytek men introduced us to a new way to have fun in the woods.
 Geocaching is a world wide phenomena where small caches of random goodies are hidden inside waterproof containers and stashed in out of the way places. The GPS coordinates are then taken and recorded at http://www.geocaching.com/. There geocachers can look up the caches that are near by and go treasure hunting for them. Our group scrambled through the woods across the way searching for a couple of hours. We were quite successfully in the end locating two caches. Little log books are kept inside the containers where we signed in and left clever messages for our brother and sister geocachers who would follow. Of  course, once bitten by the geocache bug, we had to put together a cache of our own. The prizes inside included a hand made survival bracelet made from yards of parachute cord, an African coin from Kenya, and flag pins.

        This young observer of the wild, daughter Kate, carried my new camera into the woods for me and captured this intriguing macro of a honey bee gathering pollen from goldenrod.
It was a perfect weekend and I'm sure glad I had Monday off. Whew!

That's Dave Van Ronk on guitar performing "The Entertainer."