Friday, January 4, 2013

Christmas

We had another great Christmas this year. The kids got many things and we spent lots of time with family.

Christmas eve at my mom's




Then we spend the night at my moms and Santa comes to visit us there in the morning. This year my brother spent the night too, he and I stayed up watching A Christmas Story and most of Christmas Vacation.

Santa came:

The theme for Kaitlyn this year was Justin Bieber


The theme as usual for Kyle was legos







Tuesday, November 13, 2012

Balloons

Here are a few of my favorite pictures of the regular balloons from our trip.







Friday, November 9, 2012

More Special shapes

Some more special shape balloons

ice cream cone

Noah's ark

stage coach

spidy pig

shark


airabelle (this one was huge!)

angel

basketball

cactus

space man

the little inspector

Elvis, I don't think we saw this one go up in the air so this was about the best picture of it I could get. 

Wednesday, November 7, 2012

Star Wars balloon

One of Kyle's favorite balloons was of course the Darth Vader balloon. They even had some storm troopers and other characters out by it.



Monday, November 5, 2012

Fireworks and Balloon glow

On Saturday night of the balloon festival they had a balloon glow and fireworks. The balloon glow is basically where the balloons just inflate and glow all at the same time. We were in the Diamond club for this night so we were on the opposite end of the field from the fireworks and where the balloons inflate. I had plans of taking my tripod and forgot it (then afterward realized I had my mini table top tripod in the bottom of my bag, but oh well). I found this cement wall to set my camera on but that meant I couldn't tilt it up like I wanted, so these firework pictures took some editing (mostly cropping) but I like how they turned out. Most of these used a 10 second shutter speed.


















Monday, October 29, 2012

Club tickets

Since I am having such a hard time narrowing down my pictures and deciding how to edit some of them, I thought I would go ahead and give my review of the types of clubs and tickets we purchased while at the Balloon Fiesta.

The fiesta has regular admission tickets that cost $8 each for those 13 and older. General parking is $10. They have a few picnic tables and bleachers out on the edge of the field. There are numerous vendors set up selling anything and everything. We only bought a funnel cake while there but the most interesting thing was a giant burger only instead of on a bun it was sandwiched between two donuts, seriously, heart attack waiting to happen.

John gets kinda snotty when we go to events like this and wants to pay more for the exclusive tickets. The fiesta has two types of club tickets that can be bought. The first is the Gondola club. We had a special parking pass, a special tent area sitting place, complete with fire pits and a buffet. I am pretty sure we drank about $100 worth of hot chocolate. The Gondola club also has golf carts that will take you to the parking lot to get your car or anywhere on the field you want to go. This was a nice perk. We did this Thursday morning and Sunday morning (our first and last sessions). These tickets will run you $120 for each adult and $50 for each child, but then the second session is half price. So both of these sessions for tickets was $510. John says it was definitely worth it. I am probably on board with that though it is a lot of money when we could have just paid $8 each to get in. Of course no telling how much we would have spent on food if we had done that.They also sent us a package before our trip with two bags, two hats for the kids, four pins, and our parking pass.





Friday night we had Chasers club tickets. However it rained and they canceled the event so we got rainchecks to use whenever we wanted. We used them Saturday morning. This club cost $25 per person and you still have to pay $10 for general parking. You get a snack meal and drinks. For the morning we were there we had breakfast burritos, donuts, hot chocolate, and coffee. There is a special seating area for this club with tables and chairs as well. It is not secluded like the Gondola club area but still a nice area. John did think this club was worth it but I think if you are going you might as well get these club tickets because you would spend the difference on food. Like I said it was nice to have the hot chocolate and we drank a lot of that. It is $3 a cup out amongst the vendors.


They have a balloon museum on the fiesta park site that is open year round. During the fiesta the museum has Diamond club tickets. They have an indoors eating/viewing area (which also means indoor bathrooms, a huge plus in my book). We did this club on Saturday night. We had a buffet meal that was pretty good included, got a pin, and got to tour the museum with our admission ticket. We thought we were going to have a balcony view but found out once things got started there was a wedding reception being held upstairs (which would be totally cool by the way) so we could not go up to the balcony. I was highly disappointed and therefore did not think this club was worth it. I can't remember the exact price but I think it was about $180 for all 4 of us. If we were to go back we would not buy diamond club tickets again.