Worlds, Day 3 (part II)

We now have Internet in the briefing tent, so this post is "live".

It's spitting rain outside right now, and there's a little wind. The pibal on the weather sheet indicates winds of 55 kt at 600 meters MSL (200 meters AGL). No flight tonight. Things look better for tomorrow. David Levin just said that if we fly tomorrow, it will be a "good, long, complicated flight".

I'm really trying to come up with balloon content for those that are interested. Here's a photo of the printed competition map, which of course no one is using (but we do have copies in the basket and chase vehicle):


And here's the hospitality and briefing tents:


Here's my laundry, drying Europe-style. At 45 degrees, it takes about 2 days:


On the non-balloon front, dark chocolate flavored with hot peppers is big here. We've tried the mango/cayenne, and just bought (but haven't yet tried) the maracuja/jalapeno:

Worlds, Day 3

You might have noticed that there was only one update yesterday. When we drove back out in the evening to check in and call home, the Internet service at the hospitality tent was down. The signal had been generally reliable (albeit weak) up to that point, so hopefully it was a one-time thing. We are online now, but unfortunately it's 4:00am at home so talking to our families isn't really a practical option. Overall I've gotten to talk to my wife and kids about every-other day, with most calls averaging 10 minutes or so. It's tough.

Last night at 9:30pm we received yet another text message indicating that this morning's briefing was canceled. Right now it's overcast and fairly windy. That makes us 0-for-5 on launches so far, with 9 opportunities left. According to The Weather Channel, 60% chance of rain persists through midnight tonight. However that drops to 20% for tomorrow morning, with winds in the 7-8 mph range. We then have 3 days of favorable forecasts before a 60% chance of rain returns for Saturday, the last day of competition. Technically they only need 2 flights and 3 tasks to have a valid championship, although everyone certainly wants a lot more than that. So I suspect that once the weather does clear, we'll be extra busy.

I'm not really sure what we'll do today. There's an organized tour of a local brewery at 11:00am, and hopefully we'll have a briefing (if not flying) this evening. Although we have satellite TV at the house we get only one channel in English (a European version of CNN), and you can only watch so much coverage of the current "market crisis" before you go nuts.

Knowing we had the entire day off yesterday, we decided to drive south to Graz. The city is a very interesting combination of very old architecture with very modern pieces mixed in. For example, the Murinsel mid-river cafe shown below and the "heart-like" Kunsthaus modern art museum. We started our journey by walking up to The Schloßberg, a castle on a hill. There's a really nice shopping district there as well. The funny thing was that throughout the day we ran into 10 or 15 other teams from all different countries doing the same thing.


Near the end of our walking we ran into something completely unexpected: a Chi-Chi's, complete with guacamole, fajitas, margaritas, and 10€ ($15 USD) burritos. They closed all the US locations in 2004, but apparently some still exist in Europe and the Middle East. However, we ended up at McDonalds for another round of Big Macs and fries.


Interesting photo of the day: A typical road sign you'd see at an intersection in rural Austria.


It means "balloon flying" in German:


Obviously by this point I hoped the updates would be more about ballooning and less about promoting Austrian tourism. Thanks to everyone for sticking with us. About 350 different people per day are visiting the site, with hits from 37 states and 31 countries.