Book 'em Danno! Murder One, Three Counts: The Road To Albercoyque

We made the final push of our 400 miles+ journey to Albuquerque this morning, once again leaving our hotel before dawn had broken. Believe it or not, we were in bed at 6.30pm local time last night and Linda got quite a shock when she first woke and saw the time of 10.30pm! Aaaaghhh...! Four hours of sleep is not enough to sustain anyone, particularly my better half.

Jet lag and a time difference of 7 hours is wreaking havoc although we keep having to remind each other that we only arrived on Wednesday and yet it feels like we have already been here for a fortnight! It’s quite useful that we downloaded a few things to our IPads and so at two o’clock this morning we found ourselves watching “Who Do You Think You Are” and thereby passing a little time until we reached a sensible hour to leave.
So here we are at the home of the world’s largest hot air balloon festival where this year they expect 500 balloons to be taking to the skies, weather permitting. The weather of course is critical to this activity and we well remember our last attempt to visit when the whole of the first weekend’s activities were cancelled! That would be our worst nightmare and driving the final stretch to Albuquerque under very leaden skies, we did wonder if the weather gods might strike again! The low cloud enshrouding the Sandia Mountains reminded us of Table Mountain in South Africa. Ominous, the only word that came to mind!
Well I am happy to report that this dispatch is being written whilst sitting by the swimming pool under the clearest and bluest sky you have ever seen. This is one enormous, nay gargantuan sky down in New Mexico and all the signs and weather forecasts are suggesting a perfect opening weekend. Tomorrow night’s post will either be written through smiles or tears.
We did pay a visit to Balloon Fiesta Park to familiarise ourselves with travel arrangements before tomorrow and were delighted to discover the International Balloon Museum which sits next to the Park. It was extremely busy and joy of joys was awash with Star Wars characters and lots of people catching balloon fever. 88,000 are expected to attend tomorrow which reflects the enormous popularity of this event and I just hope that two folk from Yorkshire will have their own excitement rewarded.