ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, September 24, 1996 TAG: 9609240028
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-2 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
COLUMN: Reporter's Notebook
SOURCE: LISA K. GARCIA
"Gas balloon; not hot air," Lesley Davies corrected me as I read my notes back to her. "There's a big difference."
She should know. I mean this woman had just walked into the newspaper conference room to tell me how she was forced to make a night landing with her helium-filled balloon in a Christiansburg yard. (Suffice to say it would be an extremely rare occurrence for a hot-air balloon to fly at night.)
Using what amounts to a really fancy flashlight, Davies and her co-pilot decided it was time to land in Pam and Joe Simmons' relatively obstruction-free cow pasture, or risk flying through the night pinched between two storm systems.
"It would have been a long, difficult night," Davies said. "By sunrise we would have been over ocean."
Davies, 45, and 41-year-old Cindy Petrehn, both of Vail, Colo., were the only all-female team flying in the 1996 National Gas Balloon Race. They launched from St. Louis the night of Sept. 14. The next night their white balloon lay in the Simmonses' yard on Canterbury Lane like a giant blob of half-risen dough.
Both women's balloonist fathers handed down their ballooning passion to their daughters.
Davies' father bought a balloon with nine other men and took it flying on weekends.
She got her license at 16 and holds 20 national and pending world records in gas ballooning, she said. Petrehn's late father was John R. Petrehn, who was one of the first people to attempt an around-the-world flight in 1988. Five of her nine brothers and her only sister compete in hot-air balloon races.
In bursts of conversation - her blue eyes flashing and silver bracelets jangling - Davies shared what it takes to fly. She described how sprinkling scoops of sand on the topography below lowers the balloon's weight and raises its altitude. Wind at lower altitudes tends to be slower. Riding in the balloon is like sitting still - there is very little sense of motion. The air is nearly soundless.
Her co-pilot, relatively quiet herself, described the flight's calm.
"There's no wind," Petrehn said. "You're moving with the wind. You may feel a touch of breeze on your face, but not much."
Davies and Petrehn had been in the air nearly 25 hours when they pounded on the Simmonses' door about 9:30 p.m. A headlamp protruded from each woman's forehead held there by straps that circled their heads. The balloon's strobe-like light flashed about a quarter mile away from the Simmons house.
"They looked like miners," Pam Simmons said.
Whatever the women looked like, Simmons and her husband were not about to let two women into the house who claimed to have literally dropped from the heavens. While Davies and Petrehn pleaded their case to the couple through the slit of the open door, Simmons said she and her husband considered calling the police.
Swayed by the women's sincerity and the fact that "I could see the outline of the balloon," Simmons decided to call the balloonists' race official in St. Louis.
"I told her Lesley Davies was at my door and she recognized the name right away," Simmons said. "It was very calm; we looked out the window and decided they looked reputable."
"I was encouraging her to call the police," Davies said.
Davies knew she needed to get to a phone quick. Her crew chief (and husband), Tom Davies, was driving to Raleigh, N.C., based on his wife's last radio communication an hour earlier. Tom Davies had been navigating the roads beneath his wife's balloon a solid 24 hours by himself.
By 3 a.m. Sept. 15 the balloon was deflated and packed by all three team members with help from Pam Simmons.
Their goal was not Christiansburg, but Cape Hatteras, N.C., Davies said. The women were one of 13 teams competing to fly the farthest from the launch point. Given the weather and wind, that made the cape their goal. Despite falling short of that, "We're hopeful we did quite well," Davies said.
"It's been really fun," Simmons said as she thumbed through pictures of the balloonists' flight.
"Pam and Joe's hospitality has been great," Davies said.
As far as the newly formed friendship goes between the balloonists and the Simmons family, Davies said she would like to repay the family's courtesy and have them drop in on her in Colorado.
"They don't need an invitation," Davies said.
LENGTH: Medium: 83 linesby CNB