Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta Glodeo

After a short rest, we headed back to the Balloon Festival Grounds.  The Glodeo has a scheduled time of 5:45 PM but since the event is a Glodeo we figured that nothing too much would be happening until it got dark.

We decided to visit the various vendors and see what kinds of things were for sale today.  The first thing we found was a Texas on Tour exhibit.  Texas is out looking for some tourists.  They had two different booths at this festival.  We decided to go on in and play some of their games for prizes.  Of course, we signed up for a free Texas vacation. 

We played some games at the Texas Exhibit Using This Large Screens

Baskets made from pine needles - they were gorgeous!

More art for sale

Once we were tired of walking around, we looked around for a place to have some dinner.  There were a lot of picnic tables sitting around - most full of people.  However, we joined a Mexican family who had room for two more people.  We had dinner -  a couple of Chick-Fil-A sandwiches and some hot chocolates.  We ate at the table and visited with the nice family that let us join them.  

Later we decided to go see what else there was out there.  Well, in actuality, Mary had seen the Mini Donuts Booth and so we went over and split a bag of the donuts.  There were 16 in a bag but we both probably could have downed a couple of bags each.  They were hot and fresh and wonderful.  As it was we settled for sharing just one bag and considered ourselves saintly!

Free Entertainment

Ahhh, some of the balloons are going up

Huge crowds tonight

It's a clown - where's the red nose???

There it is - he just needed more hot air!

He's up at last!

The next one goes up!

Another one getting ready to go up!

It is getting dark enough to see a glow!

These guys are trying to get a huge lighthouse up

This was Mary's favorite glowing balloon

There were huge crowds so it was hard to move around and getting pictures was even harder because the balloons only glow when the burners are fired.  So, it is almost miraculous when you actually get a picture of a glowing balloon.  You can tell we took tons of pictures to get the few glowing balloons we did.  We kept close together because we were afraid to get separated and not be able to find each other.

After the Glodeo, there were fireworks.  They were really awesome.  We saw quite a few kinds of fireworks that we hadn't seen before and they had an absolutely phenomenal ground display.

Part of the Ground Display