Hot Air Balloon Stories and Experiences
Please feel free to submit your hot air ballooning experiences! Subject to editorial review we will then give your story pride of place on this page.
How posterity will laugh at us, one way or other! If half a dozen break their necks, and balloonism is exploded, we shall be called fools for having imagined it could be brought to use: if it should be turned to account, we shall be ridiculed for having doubted.
- Horace Walpole, letter to Horace Mann, 24 June 1785.
The best way of travel, however, if you aren't in any hurry at all, if you don't care where you are going, if you don't like to use your legs, if you don't want to be annoyed at all by any choice of directions, is in a balloon. In a balloon, you can decide only when to start, and usually when to stop. The rest is left entirely to nature.
— William Pene du Bois, 'The Twenty-one Balloons.'
These vehicles can serve no use until we can guide them. I had rather now find a medicine that can cure an asthma.
— Dr. Samuel Johnson
Tell us about yours
We'd love you to submit any hot air ballooning experiences below.