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| - This was the second Cave Creek Balloon Festival I have been to... and its the last.
Just reading the other people's reviews of this event says it all.
I got there just before 4pm, and staff seemed to be very organized, they directed me to handicapped parking and had a cart waiting for me as I could not walk far.
Picture this as I will come back to this later. The event was held at the bottom of a 1.2 mile road, the road in question was a two lane road with a little strip of desert for off road parking. Which is where i was directed to park. So in this narrowish road was..
People walking to the event
Shuttle buses carrying people to the event
golf carts carting people to the event
and handicapped parkers.
We waited in line and paid $8 to get in. walked around maybe..
6 stalls selling 'stuff'
12 food stalls
3 alcohol stalls
and a corner bunched up with inflatables.
In the middle was just a ton of people walking around and some camped out for the oncoming balloons. I was surprised that within 2 minutes we had walked the whole event!
Not wanting to stand around and listen to a high school band or wanting 'festival food' we decided to see what the resort had to offer.
The resort was nice, we walked around, looked at the pool and inside the opera house where Leann Rymes will be next month. Then after a quick something to eat and drinks we headed back to the crowds.
I originally thought that the balloons would be in the roped off area that the organizers had kept people away from, however I was highly amazed to see the small fenced off area where the people were huddled together was also were people were setting up these balloons.
You could not move, volunteers and balloon teams were holding people back from their balloons as they were laid out on the floor and being blown up.
We did brave the crushed in crowds to get through, take a picture of the bumble bee and head back towards the front of the resort to where some balloons were still being laid out. (less people). Or so I thought.
All of a sudden in front of 100s of people moving through the event a balloon was inflated sideways along the ground covering a train of people who was walking. We rushed to get out of the way and there was a wall of us stuck huddled together between a steep slope of landscaping, a 20ft wall of oleander, the onslaught of people rushing into the event and the balloon wall that had just inflated. This was so badly planned.
We finally made into through the area with the balloons while being shouted at by a lady who was trying to control the out of control balloon... she was pissed that we were standing there... we had no where else to move to lady we were trapped.
It was all too apparent that these balloons were too close to trees, people, flag poles and buildings for anything good to have come out of this event. And just as we were watching in horror as the one balloon could not control itself between a flag pole and the wall of oleanders... one balloon escaped out of control.
Narrowingly missing people, fences, trees and buildings the one man crew of spiderpig went off into the wind and the dark desert night. Never to be seen of again.
I have seen reports that there was a helicopter sent after the balloon and the one man was found bruised but fine.
At in instant all balloons came down.... onto the masses of crowds i might add, people seemed to be fed up, cold and headed out of the entrance. We decided due to the number of people heading out that it was time to get out of their and try to beat the masses before people realized that the event was officially over 3 hours early.
As we headed out we felt for all the 100's of people that were queuing up still being charged $8 to get in.
As for myself, we could not find a golf cart to take us back to the car in handicapped. 100's of people queued up for the 2 small buses to take them back to their cars. I hope they made it safe.
Now it was getting really chaotic on Mule train, small streams of people were still walking from Cave Creek Rd, down Mule train, there was 100's of people on a mass exit, the shuttle buses were trying to turn around but were unable to because of the mass of people, people who live on that road were driving like crazy to get home or go out. And now me trying to navigate around streams of cars and people in a very badly lit road. To top it all one of the shuttle buses tried to overtake the people and cars and went on the wrong side of the road and nearly hit us instead of allowing people to move through and make way for it.
Best of all was the police not allowing our trail of traffic out of Mule Train to direct the traffic on the main road and keep it moving. So people, cars and buses were at a standstill for a good 10 minutes which caused more chaos.
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