For a little while though it seemed like our Greyhound bus breaking down on the way to Ottawa might stop us, but the driver seemed to have some tricks that just kept the bus running.
Due to low winds, we ended up taking off outside of Ottawa in Kars. The idea is that if you are going to take off in a balloon in the city, you want to get out of the city to land in a farmer's field. So low wind speeds would make that very difficult.
And off we went.
It really is the smoothest form of air travel I can imagine, except of course for the landing. It was jostling and bouncy landing, ending up on our side, everybody giggling.
The real scary part was driving around in a fifteen person van, in the dark, in a farmer's field. I think we only scraped one rock.