The snappy silver flight bags with the sturdy navy straps arrive, prosaically, via UPS. Stamped on their sides is “Buddy Bombard’s Great Balloon Adventure.” Now it’s concrete. Two weeks from today, my sister Jane will be celebrating her sixtieth birthday in the balmy skies of the Château country in France. The trip calls for six full days in the Loire Valley, staying for three nights at the Domaine des Hauts de Loire, near Blois, and another three at the Domaine de Beauvois near Tours. In the mornings there will be unhurried, privately guided tours of the great châteaux, followed by exquisite leisurely lunches with the best wines the area can offer. Then each evening we will fly our montgolfières, which is what the French call hot-air balloons, after the brothers Montgolfier (Jacques Etienne and Joseph Michel), who built and flew the first balloon two hundred years ago. (And when was the last time you flew a wright?) The trip, I’ll confess right now, is furiously expensive, and worth every penny.
Two grey vans pick up nine members of our party in front of the Crillon in Paris one bright June morning. Gerard and Irène Brant, who live in Geneva, will meet us at the Domaine. The hotel is small, set in a park complete with pond and swans, and under-statedly elegant. We have a welcoming Royal Kir (champagne and cassis) on the terrace, and then lunch—but not, on this trip, ever, a quick lunch. It’s nouvelle cuisine, served under the trees at tables for four: cold fresh salmon, gigot, cheese, fraises des bois in a light custard, cookies, coffee, chocolates. The wines are a Sancerre and a Montlouis. Glasses stay filled unless one objects—vehemently.
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