Fiasco Free Friday
Intuition. Sometimes we listen to it and find we were right. Sometimes we ignore it and things go badly, and through a series of events that is the situation Rebecca Kennedy found herself in.
An adventurer at heart and a flight attendant by trade, Rebecca runs a blog called “Fiasco Free Friday,” where she displays travel advice using her knowledge from the airline industry. A few years ago, she had the idea to see the balloon festival in Albuquerque, New Mexico. However, right before her trip she had a bad gut feeling. Ignoring it, she boarded the plane, excited for her new adventure.
“The first problem I ran into was that it’s a lot harder than you would think and, I didn’t know that, and I couldn’t find the place to pitch my tent and it took me like two hours to find somebody who could help and it was just all chaotic. So I finally got that set up and there were some things during the night and that part was really cool. There were other people that were camping around, some people were in like trailers, you know, some people were just in tents as well, but we just kind of all hung out. [...] So that was like, really awesome to just meet people from all over literally the world. One guy came from Germany, to come to the balloon festival, which I didn’t know was that big of a deal.”
Traditionally, more than 500 hot air balloons appear at the festival each year. Special competitions and events occur during the nine day event, including races, The Flight of the Nations Mass Ascension and the Fiesta Challenge. The festival has been occurring annually since 1972 and is one of the largest balloon festivals in the world.
Early the next morning Rebecca woke up to watch the balloons. She found the event to be underwhelming, but tried to maintain a positive attitude as she hunted down souvenirs for friends and family. Then she got on her plane to head back to Nashville, Tennessee.
She had a six hour layover in Phoenix, Arizona, and decided she would lay out in a park to soak up some sun as she waited for the time to pass. No more than 15 minutes after she found a nice spot in the grass, her bag was stolen, containing her important ID’s, money, a borrowed sleeping bag and brand new sneakers among other things.
“I should’ve listened to my gut and not gone. As adventure people, you know, we like want to go and see what’s out there and see something cool and fun, and we don’t always plan because it’s kind of like part of the adventure is in the spontaneity of it, but I think I also think if you don’t do your research, you know, if you’re not prepared for where you’re going to, at least a little more than I was, you can run into some frustrating situations. If I could do it all over again, I would go to the festival and stuff but I would plan it out more.”
It’s true, as people who love adventure we also crave the uncertainty of it all. However, it is also key we take at the very least minimal precautions before we run headfirst out the door.