Loire – pierreo.com – Join me on my journey

As indicated in the last post, I spent a week along the Loire River in June. It was a very relaxing vacation.

After a half day drive (I Left Brussels very early in the morning) I made it to Blois for lunch. I walked around the town for a while before sitting down to eat in front of the famous castle (one of many…). Here is the view of the old city with the Loire River in the background.

Here is another view with the beautiful cathedral

I went to visit the Cathedral which shows the typical Gothic style of the time it was built.

Actually, the current church is build on top of an earlier edifice, much smaller and in Roman style.

Part of the old church remains underneath the new one!

This is the back side of the Chateau de Blois (1)

And here is the view of the front entrance. It is not very impressive from the outside, but a lot better once you get in…

Continue reading “Loire Valley – Episode 1” →

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I recently spent a week along the Loire Valley. During that week, I decided to take a hot air balloon ride. I had initially planned to do this in the early morning, but got a call from the organising company telling me that the weather forecast was no good and that they suggested I go the evening before, to make sure I did get a chance.

I was at the appointed place for the meeting at 19:30 when the caravan of France-Montgolfières arrived with all the equipment. The first vehicle obviously carries the basket while the second carries the balloon in that red bag that looks like an overgrown tomato – we will see more of that later…

I discovered that there were 12 passengers for this flight and that they could take as many as 16 in this basket. They have a smalled basket in case they have 8 or less passengers… This is more popular than I thought.

We loaded up into the two vehicles and set off for the departure point. It is determined by the wind direction so that we leave upwind of where we want to go.

We unloaded the basket and set it on its side so that we could attach the balloon. This is where we will be spending 1 hour in the air – there will be three of us into each corner section of the basket with the ‘pilot’ in the middle.

The balloon is rather large and tall when it is spread along the ground.

The fans will be used to inflate the balloon before it can be heated up with the gas burners. Once everything was setup, we waited. Thierry, our pilot with the blue shirt below, was concerned about regular gusts of wind which would have made the balloon difficult to handle. Several times they released a small black helium balloon to see the wind direction and speed at higher elevation. It was very consistent at all levels.

And we waited as the wind just would not die down.

Continue reading “A flight over the Cher River” →

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