Monday 12 September 2011

Europe Trip 2011 #25: I would never be so silly as to do this!

Yesterday I had caught sight of a tethered balloon ride, on the western side of the river. After visiting the Astronomical Clock tower earlier today, I went for a bit of a wander and found out where it was located.

As you'll see in the first photo, it;s a bit of a scary contraption - nothing to put your feet on, and you're suspended in a seat below the balloon itself. Oh yeah - it's attached to the ground by a single steel cable. Who would even consider going for a ride?

DOH! 30 minutes later it was me suspended below the balloon. Now, in case you didn't know, I do not have a good head for heights [strange then that I feel absolutely fine in a plane], so this was definitely far out of my comfort zone! There was a radio available should I need to come down early, but I sensed that most of the operators knew enough English to get through the briefing :-) That and I tightened the straps after they had.... I don't like slack!

Apart from the fact that I spent half the ride counting the number of things that could go wrong [balloon rapidly deflates, cable breaks, gets really windy, seat attachment points [only two of] fail, motor to haul me in fails etc], the only big shocks I got were the sudden[!] stop at the top of the ascent and then the start of the decent.

Anyway, loads of fun! Here are the pictures!









2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Very brave!! Won't find me copying,but Aunty Lee would love a go!! cheers Mum

Rodney said...

Hello mum. Yeah, I'm sure she would!