Hot Air Ballooning in Binalong

Don's coworker Andrew Robertson, invited our family to go with his family (wife Katherine and son James) to their cabin three hours south of Sydney, in a teeny little sheep farming town called Binalong. Andrew's family has tons of land there and an old charming cabin that was built for his grandmother. We stayed for the three day weekend. The Robertson family has long time been involved with hot air ballooning, and Andrew has competed all over the world in many hot air balloon competitions. With all the wide open spaces, Binalong is the perfect town to go hot air ballooning in as well.

It was a great weekend including one rainy day where we got to chill out inside. This was the first day and being inside also gave ample time for our boys to get used to their dog Ellie. William and Burke are notoriously afraid of dogs, crying and screaming like schoolgirls every time one passes them on the sidewalk. So I was a little worried about how they would be all weekend. Ellie was the perfect dog. She is pretty calm and really likes to be petted. I think by the end of the first day all of my boys were in love with the dog. We even had to ask William to stop petting her and give her a break. If Ellie would try to walk into another room, William would just follow her and keep petting her. While she ate, Will tried to pet her. Don and I were so glad to get our boys comfortable around a dog! Here's to hoping that at least some of that will carry over to other dogs.

Here is Ellie, Kath, me and Burke on a hike we took one afternoon up to the top of a hill. Everyone who climbs the hill has to add a rock to the big pile in the background.

Here is the cabin we stayed at...with fields upon fields surrounding it.

Here is their son James, 7, reading a night time story to our boys. James is a great kid, very kind, and our boys had a blast with him.

There was a sheep shearing station next door that we went to visit. They weren't actually shearing at the time, but we got to see all the tools and as seen below, lots of extra wool.

These friendly little moths were everywhere! They are taller and much wider than my fingers as you can see. The day after the rain, there were tons and tons of them dead in the street, too. Yum.

Monday morning we woke up at 5:45 to get going. This is Don and Andrew getting the balloon set up. Kath is behind the top of the balloon. She is amazing at all of this, too. She works hard and is really fast. She tracks and follows the balloon very well. It isn't as easy as it looks. So Katheryn and James were in the front car following the balloon. Don and I took turns in the balloon, and the other of us were in a second car with our kids, following Kath. Andrew has a GPS hooked into a laptop up in the balloon, and we all have radios to keep in contact with eachother so we can meet up at the landing point to pack everything up and put it in the trailer.

A picture of our whole family with Andrew and James as well.

And we're off! I took the first turn and you can kind of see me waving to everyone down below.

A shot lookind down at the cars we had just left behind.

I thought it was so cool to see our shadow on the ground below.

Looking down at some of the thousands of sheep we saw from up in the air. We also saw cows and horses. And we even saw some kangaroos and wallabies jumping through the fields. Hot air balloons are noisy and it scared them a bit. They were moving pretty fast, trying to get away from us.

Don in action