The Fiftieth in fact. A couple flew over my house, and that would have been enough for me having photographed about fifteen instances of the yearly event.
I turned out that some friends wanted to chase down some balloons the next day, so we hopped into the car and headed north toward the launch site. To my surprise we encountered little traffic and ended up finding an ideal viewing location a mile south of the Balloon Museum. I got a few pictures with both the Pentax ME Super using Kentmere 400 and the Vivitar Ultra Wide and Slim loaded with outdated Kodak ColorPlus 200.
At noon on the same day I went down to the Plaza Vieja to catch my favorite part of the Balloon Fiesta, the performance of the Flamenco dancers from Albuquerque's International School of Flamenco. At the balloon viewing site the Pentax ME Super had developed a problem with the film advance, and that only got worse when I tried to use it to shoot some pictures of the dancers.
It was only when I developed the film from the Pentax that I could see the main problem was that the shutter was often firing at the end of the advance stroke, producing a variety of unexpected results. I made a few shots with the vuws of the dancers preparing to perform, but was disappointed I could not catch the dancers performing under the shade of the gazebo.
A Google search showed that film advance problems are not uncommon in the ME Super. I'll open up the camera to see if it looks fixable, though I don't think I would trust it again for critical work. Fortunately, I also have a Pentax ME which seems to be working fine, and I'm not exactly lacking in other options.
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As often happens, Margaret got the best shot of the day with her cellphone camera:
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