So after years of never having been, I finally went to the Bristol Balloon Fiesta on Saturday. We had friends down for the weekend and too the chance to go and see the festivities. We particularly wanted to see the night glow.
We stopped for a bite to eat in Bristol before making our way over to Ashton Court. It took us an hour to do about three miles. We’d paid for a parking ticket in advance so we could get in easier, only it wasn’t that easy. The sign-posts to the gate were terrible, and we managed to miss the entrance twice as a result. When we finally got in, we had our first run in with the less than useless marshalls. They didn’t do anything, resulting in us having to stop and ask where we were supposed to go.
When we did finally get in, we had about an hour and a half to wait until the night glow. So we wandered around for a bit. I managed to bump into a school friend I hadn’t seen in about 15 years, which was quite strange. It’s funny who you see at these places.
Anyway, the night glow was pretty spectacular, even if we didn’t get to see that much of it due to being so far away from the fence, and there not being a very good vantage point to see everything. It was late starting, but hey, it was worth it in the end. The twenty minutes of fireworks, were more like ten minutes, and they weren’t that spectacular. Still it was an OK evening.
The problem came when we went to leave. I won’t bore you with all the details, but we had a marshall next to us that stood talking to friends for a good forty minutes while everyone struggled and failed to get out of the car park. We got abuse from another marshall when we were sent up the other end of the car park to get out as that wasn’t an exit. We spent 90 minutes trying to get out of the car park. There were no marshalls to speak of, there was no information and there were a lot of annoyed and angry festival goers. It was an utter shambles. Won’t be going again, in less they can sort their act out.
