Hot Air Ballooning Flight

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.'

The balloon seems to stand still in the air while the earth flies past underneath.
— Alberto Santos-Dumont.

Suddenly the wind ceased. The air seemed motionless around us. We were off, going at the speed of the air-current in which we now lived and moved. Indeed, for us there was no more wind; and this is the first great fact of spherical ballooning. Infinitely gentle is this unfelt motion forward and upward. The illusion is complete: it seems not to be the balloon that moves, but the earth that sinks down and away...
Villages and woods, meadows and chateaux, pass across the moving scene, out of which the whistling of locomotives throws sharp notes. These faint, piercing sounds, together with the yelping and barking of dogs, are the only noises that reach one through the depths of the upper air. The human voice cannot mount up into these boundless solitudes. Human beings look like ants along the white lines that are highways; and the rows of houses look like children's playthings."
— Alberto Santos-Dumont, 'My Air-Ships,' New York, The Century Company, 1904.

Like a shamanistic language, flight speaks in different idioms. We can blast rockets to the stars. We can race across the sky on fixed wings. Ballooning appeals because it is more languorous and low-tech; it's adventure in an antique mood.What a treat to stroll through the veils of twilight, to float across the sky like a slowly forming thought. Flying an airplane, one usually travels the shortest distance between two points. Balloonists can dawdle, lollygag, cast their fate to the wind and become part of the ebb and flow of nature, part of the sky itself, held aloft like any bird, leaf or spore. In that silent realm, far from the mischief and toil of society, all one hears is the urgent breathing of the wind and, now and then, an inspiring gasp of hot air.
— Diane Ackerman, 'Traveling Light,' op-ed in the 'New York Times,' 11 January 1997.

The winds have welcomed you with softness,

The sun has greeted you with it's warm hands,

You have flown so high and so well,

That God has joined you in laughter,

And set you back gently into

The loving arms of Mother Earth.
— Anon, known as 'The Baloonists Prayer,' believed to have been adapted from an old Irish sailors' prayer.

I have known today a magnificent intoxication. I have learnt how it feels to be a bird. I have flown. Yes I have flown. I am still astonished at it, still deeply moved.

--Le Figaro, 1908.

As we were returning to the inn we beheld something floating in the ample field of golden evening sky, above the chalk cliffs and the trees that grow along their summit. It was too high up, too large, and too steady for a kite; and, as it was dark, it could not be a star. . . The village was dotted with people with their heads in air; and the children were in a bustle all along the street and far up the straight road that climbs the hill, where we could still see them running in loose knots. It was a balloon, we learned, which had left St. Quentin at half past five that evening. Mighty composedly the majority of the grown people took it. But we were English, and were soon running up the hill with the best. Being travelers ourselves in a small way, we would fain have seen these other travelers alight.
The spectacle was over by the time we gained the top of the hill. All the gold had withered out of the sky, and the balloon had disappeared. Whither? I ask myself; caught up into the seventh heaven? or come safely to land somewhere in that blue uneven distance, into which the roadway dipped and melted before our eyes? Probably the aeronauts were already warming themselves at a farm chimney, for they say it is cold in these unhomely regions of the air. The night fell swiftly. Roadside trees and disappointed sight-seers, returning through the meadows, stood out in black against a margin of low, red sunset. It was cheerfully to face the other way, and so down the hill we went, with a full Moon, the color of a melon, swinging high above the wooded valley, and the white cliffs behind us faintly reddened by the fire of the chalk kilns.
— Robert Louis Stevenson, from his travelogue of a canoe trip from Antwerp to Paris, written when he was 25, 'An Inland Voyage,' 1878.

Alan Parsons Project "Blown by the Wind"

by Ian Bairnson, Stuart Elliott, and Alan Parsons

All along the shoreline

There are footprints by the sea

They head into the distance...

Then they lead right back to me

I made the break to freedom

Now I'm following the dream

You're never going to get here

If you hold the old routine

Now everything we possess

That fills our empty lives

Is only good for leaving far behind

We are blown by the wind

Just like clouds in the sky

We don't know where we're going,

Don't know why

We just ride with the wind

And we'll drive through the rain

We don't know where we'll get to

Or if we'll get back again

Call along the valley

And you just may find us there

I couldn't say for certain

Cause we may be anywhere

Head into the sunset

Or just wander out to sea

Wherever your heart leads you

Is the place you're meant to be

And someone who could be impressed

With ordinary lies

Could really use a little peace of mind

We are blown by the wind

Just like clouds in the sky

We don't know where we'll go,

But we'll get by

We just ride with the wind

And we'll drive through the rain

We don't know where we'll get to

Or if we'll get back again

Now everything we possess

That fills our empty lives

Is only good for leaving far behind

We are blown by the wind

Just like clouds in the sky

We don't know where we're going,

Don't know why

We just ride with the wind

And we'll drive through the rain

We don't know where we'll get to

Or if we'll get back again