Hot Air Balloons, Santa Fe, and Watermelon

Hello friends.

Posting Day Three from our New Mexico Trip.  

When  I was 26, I was on a hot air baloon team.  Our lead pilot back then was awesome and was asked to do a lot of commercial flights and invitationals. My favorite experience was at an invitational in Telluride, Colorado.  Flying down the middle of that city was amazing, but flying around Albuquerque was always wonderful as well.  Anyway, I wanted my daughter to experience the special feeling of being in a hot air balloon in Albuquerque (the balloon capital of the world).  Her son was a bit afraid so he stayed with me.

Allie was lucky to have the owner of Rainbow Ryders as her pilot and she met a wonderful woman who is an established travel blogger (I will try to get her contact info and share it because she was very interesting and I bet her blog is interesting too).  They hit it off really well, and she was so encouraging to Allie who wants to get into Social Media Marketing.  For the travel blog video they got to go inside the baloon during inflation and Allie got to get some fun pictures.  Here is one of them.  Her pilot is in the background.  On a side note, her pilot was Scott Appleman who I knew in High School - how fun is that!

Once the balloon was fully inflated, they jumped in the basket and took off.  The travel blogger is next to Allie in this picture.  They even dresssed alike - I could see them being long time friends.

This is the balloon right afer take-off.

Here is a great in-flight picture of Allie. 

After the flight they had breakfast and mimosas in the desert.  Such a great picture!

We jumped in the car after the flight, changed, and drove to Santa Fe.  We went to visit the miraculous staircase at Laredo Chapel.

HERE is the story if you are interested. There are several movies about it if you are interested in learning more.  I have visited this chapel several times and it gives me goosebumps each time. 

We walked around the square visiting shops and galleries - all way out of our price range but full of beautiful things.  We found a lot of pretty courtyards - this was one of them.

We ate at a wonderful top rated restaurant but didn't remember to mark down the name.  The food was amazing and we loved the sopapillas.  

Next, we went to Meow Wolf which is an interactive art museum.  It is built like a two story house and you basically explore the house to find all the different sections of art.  Here is my grandson about to slide down the dryer into a world of underwater art.  We crawled through the fireplace, refrigerator, closets, etc.  Super fun and everything was amazing other than the outside worker with pink hair - she was obviously on a power trip and treated everyone pretty badly.  We noticed tons of reviews complaining about how mean she treats people - we complained to management in person so maybe they will do something about her.

When we finished, someone wrecked into my rental car. Enterprise and my insurance, State Farm, were super helpful, but her insurance, Farmers, has some pretty poor customer service - very difficult to talk to anyone in person.  I won't be switching insurance companies to Farmers ever (we had considered it at one time).  We got back to Albuquerque and went to a juice bar to ensure we "ate" healthy after all we had eaten the previous few days.  It was super cool, but I forgot to get any pictures.  

I will post our last full day soon.   Hope I haven't lost you completely, because I have two fun watermellon themed cards to share before I end.  Both are made with DRS Designs images and color blocking inspired by THIS card.

Hugz,

Nancy