We often land at Lasham on our Hampshire flights, whether coming from the south or the north. We do this by using winds at different heights and “steering” the balloon. It’s great when we land there because having packed the balloon away we drive or walk over to the club house where we are able to have our champagne and certificate signing on the benches outside, the restaurant is often open on either a morning or evening flight, there are toilets for our passengers etc.
However sometimes we miss and this weekend we landed not far away in a small field that had been cut for hay and baled and as we drove into the field the owner was driving in with a rather old tractor following underneath the balloon to collect the last bales.
So having packed the balloon away we joined the farmer Clive Gregory and his family who were having a family picnic to celebrate the last trailer load. Clive joked to his children that next year they would have two balloons landing. Our pilot Kim politely suggested that the chances of that ever happening again were less than zero, it was a moment in time where the tractor happened to be going the same way in the field that the balloon had chosen to land in! After slices of chocolate cake from Clive and our passengers on their way back in the minibus, our crew helped throw up the last bales onto the trailer and the balloon and tractor drove out of the field side by side. It sounds rather like a children’s story book ending!
