Hot Air Balloon Festival
Since the annual Hot Air Balloon Festival is coming up, I thought I would share our experience from last year. Unfortunately the weather doesn’t look great this year, but hopefully some of the activities will still happen!
The festival happens in Decatur, AL. It is formally called Alabama Jubilee. On their website, you can find all the details of events and such. The event itself is free, but the vendors for food and activities are not. The negative here is you have to buy “jubilee bucks” or something like that. The big negative here is you don’t always know how much you need and there are no refunds. I am hoping at some point they change this.
We arrived around 4 pm or so. We wanted to catch fun flight and glow that happens in the evening time. Parking wasn’t too big of an issue, and it was free. We did park at a nearby school and walked a bit, but we avoided a LOT of traffic this way.
Once we arrived, we found a spot and set up our chairs and blankets. We did bring some snacks, and the kids just played. We didn’t setup in the field with the balloons because we wanted to see them farther away. We did eat from some of the vendors for dinner as well as Kona Ice (that was a doozy). The kids loved getting to just run and play and I think they all found the balloons to be really neat.
We did have issues with lines at the end of the night which was frustrating. We were trying to use all of our money we already bought. The most frustrating part was the vendors were out of so much stuff. So we would wait in line for a long time to find out they didn’t have what we wanted. Ultimately, I would get all of our snacks earlier in the evening to avoid this issue!
They do have a Facebook page with more up-to-date information. So if you ever plan to go, I would definitely check out their website and Facebook to get all the detailed info for that particular year!
