If You Can’t Stanley The Heat, Get Out Of The Basket

Day: 281

Towns / Cities Visited: 185

Countries Visited: 31

Steps Taken Today: 9,891

Steps Taken Around the World: 4,455,130

Today was the day, one of those days when we would have the pleasure of ticking something off of our bucket list. Now, there isn’t many things that inspire me to leave the warmth and comfort of sleeps arms at 4:30am, but sometimes sacrifices must be made. So, what was the big event? We were going to take a trip in a hot air balloon. Originally, this was going to be my birthday present to myself, but with my thirtieth long since passed, it was just another pre-anniversary adventure, and what an adventure it would turn out to be.

Groggy from lack of sleep and the early wake up call, we robotically packed our things, dropped our keys in the out of hours return, and tumbled into our car which was luckily parked just across the road. It was hard for our brains to quite compute what was going on, what with it still being dark and all, but after a relatively easy drive, we arrived at Entally Lodge, the assigned meeting place for the flight. We were a bit early but the wife of the couple who runs the business was there to greet us, and not long after the chef of the lodge arrived and opened up, allowing us to duck inside out of the cold as the remainder of the group arrived and checked in. Once all of the formalities were out of the way, we were all bundled either into the minivan…