![\"hot](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/r9f.352.myftpupload.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/09\/hot-air-balloons.jpg?resize=584%2C388\" "\\"This")
Like many recent college graduates, I spent the summer of 1977 moping in my parents\u2019 basement.\u00a0 My college roommate, Sharon, was doing the same, 3,000 miles away in Berkeley. We had no jobs and no prospects, so we spent a lot of time on the phone.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhy don\u2019t you come out to California?\u201d Sharon proposed one day.<\/p>\n
Since it was the first idea all summer that made me smile, I thought, \u201cWhy not?\u201d<\/p>\n
A couple of weeks later, I waved goodbye to my stunned parents, then boarded a Greyhound bus that would take me across the country.<\/p>\n
First, though, it would take me to St. Louis, where two college friends had just started medical school at Washington University.<\/p>\n
It was great to see them. It was even greater taking a shower and sleeping in a bed\u2014my last taste of such comforts until I\u2019d arrive days later in Berkeley.<\/p>\n
Before my friends put me on the bus the next morning for the second half of my westward adventure, we wandered through Forest Park. There people swarmed among hot air balloons, most just flat or half-filled expanses of brightly colored nylon on the lawn. A few were fully inflated into majestic orbs poised for flight.<\/p>\n
We watched as the balloonists adjusted ropes and burners, then took off to land wherever the wind (combined with skill and a little luck) would blow them. It was the Great Forest Park Balloon Race<\/a>, founded just four short years earlier\u2014the same September we had entered college.<\/p>\n This weekend marks the 43rd<\/sup> anniversary of the Great Forest Park Balloon Race. Which means I\u2019m marking my 39th<\/sup> anniversary of coming to California. I had no idea back then how long I\u2019d stay, or what I\u2019d do, or how I\u2019d survive.<\/p>\n But when Sharon picked me up dirty and exhausted late at night from the Greyhound bus station, she drove twisting, up and up, through the Berkeley hills, stopping finally at the Lawrence Hall of Science.<\/p>\n \u201cLook!\u201d she said.<\/p>\n There stretched out before us was the fathomless black of the bay, the twinkling lights of Berkeley and Oakland below, San Francisco a shimmering faraway specter, the night sky shot through with billions of \u00a0stars.<\/p>\n I had arrived home.<\/p>\n Decades later, my husband and I sometimes say, \u201cWe should take a hot air balloon ride over Napa Valley someday.\u201d<\/p>\n We haven\u2019t yet, and I suspect we never will. We\u2019re too cheap, and besides, I\u2019m really not all that adventurous. It still amazes me that I ventured away from home and onto that Greyhound bus so long ago.<\/p>\n But I\u2019m glad I did, glad I let myself land wherever the winds blew me.<\/p>\n *<\/p>\n Have you ever been adrift and let the winds blow you wherever they take you? Where have you landed?\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Like many recent college graduates, I spent the summer of 1977 moping in my parents\u2019 basement.\u00a0 My college roommate, Sharon, was doing the same, 3,000 miles away in Berkeley. We had no jobs and no prospects, so we spent a … Continue reading