Fly away November

Well the year is flying away. Today in the city we had the Myer Christmas Parade, which was OK but nowhere near as full on as last year's in Amsterdam. We finally had our first decent sunny day in a while - we reached 26 degrees.

During the week we also finally took the Hot Air Balloon ride and had a fabulous time. It's truly amazing. We got up at 4.30am and then arrived at the meeting point at 5.15am. After the pilot checked the situation, we took off from Monash University sports ground, along with 2 other balloon parties. We had 10 on our balloon plus the pilot.

It was incredibly smooth taking off, almost like floating. The morning was actually quite mild at 10 degrees (already at 6am). We really lucked out with the winds and the lack of clouds. We travelled across the South East towards the city and landed with a few bumps in Royal Park, just north of the city.

We flew over Malvern / Kooyong / Chadstone area as well as Richmond and the MCG. We had a glorious sunrise and we could even hear the road traffic from the ballooon when we got lower, although it wasn't annoying.

We saw the stunning St Patrick's Cathedral from the air and had a truly memorable morning, followed by a lovley breakfast at Hilton on the Park. (Just a pity we had to go straight to work that day).