Bloomington: Kiwanis Club of South Central Indiana Hot Air Balloon Festival

For literally as long as I can remember, I have wanted to ride in a hot air balloon. (Spoiler alert: I still haven't ridden in one.) It just seems like it would be so awesome. Hot air balloons then, by default, must be awesome. When I found out about a hot air balloon festival coming to Bloomington, I somehow convinced/begged Eric to go to it and it turned out to be pretty cool.

This was the inaugural Kiwanis Club of South Central Indiana Hot Air Balloon Festival (do they win an award for longest event name ever?). There were several events that happened over the course of the weekend (Sept 6-8), but we just went on Saturday evening. There was supposed to be a race that didn't happen, so they wound up just blowing up like 15 balloons and making them look cool.

I had never even seen a hot air balloon up close before, let alone watch it be blown up. It was pretty cool.

There were a bunch of crazy balloons, like this dinosaur.

Here they are blowing up the scarecrow balloon. First they put a big fan near the opening to get a bunch of air in, then they heat the air up until it floats.

The picture above is probably my favorite ;)

There were all sorts of cool balloons. The rocket man was pretty awesome.

Hopefully next year they'll do this again! It was not free ($10-12 to get in, per carload) but it was pretty cool. They also had food for sale and various booths of things for sale (mostly for kids).