The fog burned off, the breeze picked up, and a dozen hot-air balloons roared to life yesterday morning at the Flying Circus Airshow in Fauquier County.
They looked glamorous, their flame-belching burners lofting bright ripstop nylon domes against blue sky.
Up-and-down motion is no problem for these modern-day balloons, which can lift a passenger-laden craft hundreds of feet per minute.
But balloons don't steer. Where they go depends on the wind.
So for every breeze-blown basket at the airshow's annual balloon festival, which continues today, someone has to chase along on the ground.
For pilot Ken Krieger and his Gone With the Wind balloon, the designated chasers were son Evan Krieger and friend David Berka.
All three are from upstate New York, utterly unfamiliar with the back roads of Fauquier. That just made it interesting.
"We don't know where we're going, and we don't care," Berka said with bravado as he and Evan Krieger steered a conversion van hauling a trailer onto U.S. 17.
They kept the balloon in sight as they rode, watching it soar to 2,500 feet, then to 4,000--one of the day's highest flights.
It blew west over cattle-dotted fields and silver-green treetops and big round bales of hay.
Below, Krieger turned left off U.S. 17 onto Morgansburg Road. For a second, neither he nor Berka could see their balloon.
Then they caught a flash of color low in the sky.
"That's him, right there!" Krieger said.
"How's that for nailing it?" Berka said. "We're right on him."
To get to the balloon they had to drive onto private property. People are usually tickled to see a balloon land on their property, Berka said, but he always stops to ask before taking the van and trailer too far.
Yesterday, the homeowner cheerfully waved them on to the cow pasture where the balloon awaited. He asked only that they shut the gate behind them.
The Gone With the Wind balloon had floated to a rest near a downed oak tree. Krieger and his passengers--Pete and Doris Minnix of Bedford County and Tim Karney of Gainesville--stood in the basket, the balloon still inflated in case they had to take off again.
Berka assured them they had permission to land.
"There's cow crap everywhere," Evan Krieger commented. "It's all dry," said his dad.
Crew and passengers maneuvered the balloon, called the "envelope," to the ground. They watched out for brambles, which could rip the fabric. Then they squeezed the air out and packed the balloon into the trailer.
Back on land the three passengers still seemed to be floating, grins stretching off their faces.
It wasn't frightening at all, they said.
"You're so busy looking out at how beautiful everything is, you're not thinking that you're suspended 4,000 feet in the air on 2 inches of plywood," Karney said. "You're just enjoying the experience."
Ken Krieger produced a bottle of sparkling wine and a round of plastic cups.
As he filled them for a toast, he explained about the balloonists' prayer, traditionally said at the beginning or end of a flight.
"I don't like to do it before a flight, because it doesn't exactly inspire confidence if your pilot is praying," he said.
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