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Saturday, October 9, 1999
Rolling Rooms With a View
By Andrew Padilla
Journal Staff Writer
While standing atop a recreational vehicle overlooking Balloon Fiesta Park early Friday morning, Marilyn Garrett said she would like to relay this message to her husband back in Lincoln, Neb.: "David, eat your heart out!"
She was having the time of her life while her husband, a psychologist with the Nebraska Department of Corrections, stayed home to work.
He didn't want to come to the Kodak Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta because the 930-mile trek would be too long.
Well, it was, Marilyn said, as three colorful balloons floated about 100 feet above her head. "But it was well worth it."
Garrett arrived in Albuquerque on Thursday with her friends, Sharol and Mark Starr, in a brown-and-white RV with a big Nebraska Cornhuskers logo on the back.
They set up camp in the $38-a-night fiesta RV lot and were treated to an early-morning kaleidoscope that was viewable from the warm confines of their front seats.
"We've got all our own facilities," said David Williams, a former Albuquerque resident who moved to Colorado in 1992.
Williams and his wife, Mary Beth, and their two young sons, Andrew and Zachary, are friends of the Starrs and decided to meet in Albuquerque.
"We've got a color TV inside," David Williams said. "We were watching fiesta coverage while actually looking at the balloons overhead."
And the night before, they were all playing cards, telling jokes and meeting their fiesta neighbors -- the 1,300 or so RV enthusiasts who would rather sleep on the dusty fiesta grounds than in some stuffy hotel room.
Steve Feeley, the fiesta's event sales manager, said there's nothing like the camaraderie that's evident in the RV parking lots.
Many of the RVs have picnic tables and lawn chairs just outside of the doors. Children run in and out, waiting for the next special shape to come floating by.
"If you have a bunch of like-minded people who are interested in ballooning and fiesta, there is a natural brotherhood there," Feeley said.
He said the biggest advantage of having so many RV enthusiasts is that they're already at the park, so they don't add to the fiesta-related traffic jams.
Most people start reserving their parking spaces early. Many have already begun making reservations for next year, Feeley said.
LeRay Bobinsky and her husband, Ron, led a group of 38 retirees in 19 RVs from Georgetown, Texas, to this year's fiesta.
"We had never been here before, but we're just having a ball," LeRay Bobinsky said. "We're just like kids."
The group took advantage of their VIP area, setting up a row of chairs and watching the balloons drift around them.
"It's great to be in a motor home parked in the front row where you can see the whole thing," said John Roberson of Sun Valley, Calif. He and his wife, Karen, travel in their RV to events all around the country.
"Right now, (the balloon fiesta) ranks at the top, but Alaska was great," Roberson said, just as a wave of about 100 balloons hissing with gas-fed flames began to pass overhead. "This is awesome. I wouldn't have wanted to miss it."
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