Balloons & our first visitor!

I’m trying not to entitle every post heading with an ending exclamation point, but there have been so many exciting things this past week that it’s hard to contain myself. For the sake of some of my co-workers back in Texas, I did hold to only one. You know who you are.

A rundown of the week timing partly for you, mostly for me; so I can remember the chaos. I had a week’s worth of vacation (or holiday time as it will hence forth be known as) that I had to use by September 30th. Adam starts classes on September 19th, so I really needed to use it up by then. So, I decided just to take a full week off for our pre-puppy trip (or puppymoon as Cara from Petrelocation called it) and the girls arrival. A week ago Friday, I went to work as usual, then Adam picked me up from the office & we headed straight for the airport. 4 wonderful days in Barcelona. See the (as he described it) mega post below. We got back to Bristol late Tuesday afternoon/early evening.

When we’d originally booked the trip a month or so ago, the girls were supposed to arrive Wednesday afternoon, however the flight schedule changed and they couldn’t leave DFW until Wednesday which put them in the UK Thursday. It actually worked out really well because it gave us all day Wednesday to run errands & get ready for them to be here. You know, little things like buy dog food & bowls, figure out where to put their crates, assemble the dog gate. They made it safely to us about 7:30pm Thursday evening. You’ll even be proud of me, I did not let them sleep in our bed; they had to go in their crates the first night. I was so exhausted from not sleeping Wednesday night because of worry and pacing in the house most of the day Thursday that I knew it was best for all the parties involved that I get a good night’s sleep (read: mostly Adam).

Friday we went park exploring during the day. We weren’t sure how far Ginger would make it, so we split it up into several smaller walks, but she did really well. We’ll start trying to lengthen them out some as we go. We’d planned to go out to the Bristol Balloon Fiesta for the evening balloon launch at 6pm. About 3 or so we loaded up the car to head out. A moment for a detour in my train of thought. I will never, ever, ever purchase another vehicle with cloth seats again. Dog hair wipes off leather, it does not off cloth. Poor Adam and the vacuum cleaner had about an hour long date after the 45 minutes the girls were in the car.

We’re on our way to the Fiesta in our Fiesta (got to get a joke in about the car ) & it starts pouring. My mother has always claimed that the British have a sixth sense on rain. Like they know just when to bring in their laundry off the line or how to wait an extra 15 minutes before walking home so they avoid the shower. She says she doesn’t ever think she’ll figure out how they do it. I’m with her. You can even ask them & they just claim their lucky. I’m not buying it – they know something that they’re not willing to share. So, the Americans without the internal radar system turned around and went home.

Saturday morning we stayed at home & I caught up on paperwork and bills. Okay, I’m going to tangent again (isn’t it nice that I warn you?). We have gotten no less than seven bills from British Gas (our electric & gas provider). We got one, then a correction – it was £1.17 less than the first and had a later due date, I accepted. We got another correction back to the original price, but an even later due date. Then we got a form requesting us to do our own meter reading and send info back to them. I did that & we received another bill. I can’t remember the amount for it, but the due date was later still. Then we got two bills on the same day one which read across the top “Final Bill” and one “First Estimated Bill”, they were for the same amount (and two different due dates). Then last week we got another one that says it’s our “First Actual Corrected Bill”. It’s not due until August 31st, but I went ahead & paid it just to see if they’d quit sending us bills that confuse me. I’m pretty sure that they have now spent more on postage & printing costs than they got from my payment.

I promise, I really am getting to the point of the title of my post.

In Fort Worth, PwC has a client who also has manufacturing facilities and some operations in Europe, one location being about an hour south of Bristol. Because of these operations, the PwC Fort Worth office requests the PwC Bristol office to do part of the audit over here & send the information back to them. This summer, the manager and partner from PwC Fort Worth are also doing a tour of some of the European locations, meeting the clients & the PwC folks that they have been emailing and calling for the last couple of years. Even in the super technology world we live in, it’s nice to put a face with a name! I was pretty excited when the manager emailed me & said she’d be in Bristol over the weekend. Not only did we work together occasionally, Robyn is a friend, a confidant & a sounding board for me in the office, and I was thrilled to get to show off my new city to her. Plus now we can officially say we’ve had a visitor!

Robyn called Saturday afternoon to let us know she’d landed and we made plans to pick her up at the hotel and go try the balloon fiesta again. We did just that. After a few minutes of both me & Adam thinking the other one had checked the directions on how to get out there, we realized that we were going to give Robyn the scenic tour of Bristol. Mental Note: next time we have visitors, plan better. We made it out there and managed to find a spot to stand where we could see the inflation and launching process. There were so many more people there than I expected. I felt safe knowing that the weather sixth sense had told all these people it was okay to be outside tonight.

We watched as 87 hot air balloons were inflated and lifted off all within about an hour of each other. It was one of the neatest things I’ve seen. I can’t imagine the logistics of coordinating that many balloons in a tight space all trying to go up at once. We tried guessing the shape and size as the fabric came to life. Most were pretty tame, but occasionally they’d be a square balloon (how does that even work??) or one shaped like a dragon. It was really neat seeing them taking off. The only downside we realized on the walk back to the car…up a hill again – I now have a witness to the extent of hills in this city…was that we couldn’t really see them flying once they were up because of our vantage point. I think our plan for next year’s fiesta is to sit on top of a hill somewhere to watch them in the air. I’m glad we get to be here to see it twice so we can experience both sides of the event.











Anyone want to make reservations at the Powell Inn for next year’s Fiesta? August 9-12, 2012. Mark your calendar now!