My good friend Kylee recently got her hot air balloon license to fly and has a balloon and it worked out super perfectly to meet up with her and her family in Cedar City on our way up to Salt Lake for a visit. We stayed the night with my friend Brian and his family in Enoch, then it took us about 30 minutes or so to get to Cedar City early Saturday morning.

Fun to crew for a new pilot and learn her balloon and the way she runs things. This was her first flight on her new license without an instructor or anything like that. We were so surprised to see some of our California ballooning pilots and friends as well who were meeting up with us that day.

Ready to take off!

Up, up and away! Great launch!

Everything went smoothly and I think they flew for about 45 minutes before deciding to land.

Kylee is the balloon on the left. She touched down in this field and Nate (her husband) walked her up towards the road and to us. Tony did scale the barbed wire fence to go help as they got a bit closer.

It is tradition to cut your shirt when you are a new pilot and have done your first flight so here is Nate doing just that. I couldn't stop laughing - he cut off so much!

Then we all signed the shirt (hard to do with a Sharpie on fabric!) and we ended up at HuHot in St. George for lunch. Kylee and Nate's first time (their son James was there too!) and we had a great time getting food and trying different sauces.

Since we were not in a rush to get to Salt Lake for anything, we drove by to check on the construction of the St. George temple, picked up a craft order at Michael's, went to Crumbl to get cookies for the family that let us stay the night, visited with them for a bit, then headed to Santaquin where my friends Ben and Hilary just moved to recently. 

We got the house tour (they recently bought a cool place they are fixing up) and spent a couple hours visiting and catching up. I love them so much! I met Hilary and then Ben when I lived in Arizona. Ben was part of the "man cave" and after young single adult family home evening nights (YSA FHE), me and some other girls would go to the man cave to hang out and play the Wii. So so fun! Great times and I am glad we've been able to keep in touch after all this time.

We finally had to say goodbye and our next destination was West Jordan where we'd be staying with Laura & her family for the next week.