The Runaway Balloon

Every August, more than a hundred hot-air balloons fill the sky above Bristol for the city's famous balloon festival. That year, Megan Price was flying her small red and yellow balloon for the first time without an instructor. She had been training for two years, and she had checked the weather forecast three times that morning. Light winds, clear skies. Perfect.

For the first twenty minutes, everything went well. She was floating gently over the river and waving at the crowds below when the wind suddenly changed direction. While the other balloons were drifting east, hers began to move quickly toward the hills. She tried to go higher to find a different wind, but the burner made a strange noise and stopped working properly. Megan realized that she was losing height and that she wasn't going to reach the landing area.

Below her, a farmer called Tom Harris was sitting on a fence, eating a sandwich. He had just finished milking his cows and was looking forward to a quiet afternoon. When he heard a loud noise above his head, he looked up and almost fell off the fence. A huge red and yellow balloon was coming down straight into his field.

The basket hit the grass, bounced twice and stopped right in the middle of forty very surprised cows. For a moment, nobody moved. Then the cows walked slowly toward the basket, and one of them started to lick the side of it. Megan stood up, took off her helmet and looked around. "Excuse me," she said politely. "I think I'm a bit lost."

Tom laughed so hard that he had to sit down. "You're not the first," he said when he could speak again. "A balloon landed in my grandfather's field in 1983. He talked about it for the rest of his life." He helped her pull the balloon away from the cows, who seemed disappointed, and he made her a cup of tea while she called her team. They had been following her by car, but they were stuck in traffic and needed another hour to arrive.

While they were waiting, Tom showed Megan around the farm. She had never been close to a cow before, and he had never been inside a balloon basket. By the time the team arrived, they had discovered that they both loved old movies, terrible jokes and chocolate cookies.

Megan came back the following weekend with a box of cookies and a gift: a free balloon flight. Tom was nervous at first, but when they rose above the hills and he saw his farm from the sky, he went completely quiet. "Well," he said at last, "the cows look much smaller from up here." Now, every August, Megan's team has a special landing place on the festival map. It's called Harris Field, and the cows are always waiting.