Albuquerque Balloon Festival – Day Four

We have noticed that we are the youngest people on this RV tour, but fortunately, or maybe by design, we are at the edge of the Fantasy RV tour sites. This means we are camped by the general public, which in our case means we are camped next to the Fulltime RV Families. This allows us to hear children running around, playing, laughing, crying, but just generally having fun. We were sitting outside on Thursday night when we heard a loud announcement across the way that “the baby has arrived”!  Earlier in the day we had noticed a very pregnant woman walking around and it was her baby that was born, at 9:00 p.m..  Friday evening, when she was showing off her baby girl, I had to go over for a look. Seriously I was the oldest one there so I think I am the Full Time RV Family grandmother 🙂

Well today was the final day for the balloon fiesta and it was windy this morning, which meant the balloons were not able to go up for a mass ascension. A few balloons did a static display and we did watch it on TV. The few balloons that tried to inflate had trouble staying up in the wind and quickly came back down, so I’m glad we didn’t bother going down to the field. I have more than enough pictures of balloons and I think I have bored you enough with balloon pictures!

But the word “Balloon” is in the title of this blog so there had to be a least one balloon picture 🙂

Part of our package was a trip to Old Town Albuquerque and we really enjoyed it.  Old Town was the first Albuquerque neighborhood in 1706, when a group of Spanish families settled there, not far from the Rio Grande. The settlers organized their new town in the traditional Spanish colonial way, with a central plaza anchored by a church.

The original adobe church collapsed after a long rainy summer in 1792. The families rebuilt the church and in 1793 the San Felipe de Neri church was completed. Today this adobe church, with walls five feet thick, is the oldest in Albuquerque and its white towers mark Old Town from a distance. The church is still a functioning Catholic church and I really wish we had been able to get to Old Town early enough to attend Mass.

The rectory and grounds

Also traditional in Spanish towns is the town square, I would love to be here for Christmas. I can just picture the decorations, music, and everyone attending Christmas Eve Mass 🙂

Fall is arriving in Albuquerque

The rest of Old Town is comprised of stores and restaurants housed in very old adobe buildings.

If you were a fan of the show Breaking Bad, which was based and filmed in Albuquerque, you could tour the Breaking Bad motorhome that was used as a drug lab in earlier episodes of the show.

Tonight we had a farewell happy hour and dinner and tomorrow our time wraps up with a farewell breakfast.

We really enjoyed our time at the Balloon Festival and met so many wonderful people. We are grateful to have won this trip but honestly I don’t think we would do another group RV tour. We may feel differently in another ten years, but right now we have no problems travelling on our own and we believe we could have done this trip much cheaper than the $1,200 Fantasy Tours was charging. However the really funny thing is hubby won the Social Hour prize … a $100.00 gift certificate for another tour! We kinda felt bad about winning that since we had won this trip and have no plans for a future trip so we are hoping to give it to someone else who is going on another trip.

Until next time …