Our wild goose chase...

Saturday we watched the crazy balloon guys trying to make their way to Montana.  Finally around 4:00 we saw them start to really get some wind and they were moving to the southeast pretty fast.  We thought they were on their journey.

Tramp 1 headed into town and I started cooking dinner.  I checked on the Internet at a site that was tracking the balloon guys live.  It was really neat to watch them on a map.  I got this idea about going to try to get one last glimpse of them before dark.  As the storm clouds built up to a nasty dark color, I quickly packed our dinner up in a pan with a tight lid, wrapped it in towels and tucked it into a box with plates and silverware.  When Tramp 1 got home, we took off after the balloon guys, wondering how they were doing in the storm - it was just starting to rain and thunder.



We drove for miles, questioning our sanity with the rapidly approaching darkness.  We made our way around the backside of the storm and the weather cleared but there was no sign of the balloons.

Driving up towards the Ochoco mountains afforded us a more panoramic view.  We knew this was the area that the balloons guys were tracked to but we still didn't see anything.  We passed only one other rig - a truck parked in the middle of the gravel road with a gal at the wheel.  She moved over and as we passed, we saw a guy walking through the brush towards her.  He was on Nature Conservancy land and we wondered what he was doing out there.  You see all kinds of things out driving gravel roads...

It was pushing darkness quickly and we had climbed up above the valley.  We either had to keep going and cross the mountains to the highway or turn around and go all the way back the same way we came.  We opted to keep going - crazy since we hadn't driving those gravel roads in a few years and we didn't have a map with us.  It took forever and we got home at 11:00 P.M. - just in time to catch the news.  We found out that we were chasing balloons with no pilots!  They bailed out earlier due to the storm and the contraption with the balloons took off and kept going.  The gal and guy we saw must have been part of the ground support and had gone to find the remains of the craft.  We were close, so close - just too late...

Our trip took us three and a half hours.  We ended up eating our dinner while watching the news at home...  You can read more about their crash landing here.