New Hampshire residents welcome backyard hot air balloon landings

Published 2:00 pm Wednesday, July 13, 2016

DERRY, N.H. — Cathy Taylor awoke to a warm, smiling face with the Tuesday morning sun, but it belonged to neither her husband nor her children.

It was Smile High, a 100-foot tall, 70-foot wide hot air balloon, coming in for a gentle landing in her large backyard shortly after 6 a.m.

“I looked, and all I could see was this huge smiley face looking at me — not what I expected to see,” Taylor, 52, laughed. “Usually we have deer in our backyard, but there was a hot air balloon!”

As the balloon descended with a basket full of eight passengers and a pilot, one woman — Theresa Labo — waved toward the Taylor home. She and Taylor had met some months prior at a networking event.

The balloon was piloted by Tony Sica, owner of High 5 Ballooning in Derry, New Hampshire. He politely asked the Taylors if he could pack up in their yard before disassembling Smile High and presenting the homeowners with a bottle of champagne.

The passengers were then treated — off the Taylor property — to a picnic lunch and champagne celebration, made all the more appropriate as Labo modeled a new diamond ring. Her partner of just over a year, Kevin Brady, had proposed to her just after landing.

“I had had it on my bucket list forever to do a balloon ride,” Labo, 50, said. “It’s so funny that all the people — we went over their houses — are posting pictures (on Facebook), and I’m like, I’m up in that balloon!”

Sica has been ballooning since 1995, and opened High 5 Ballooning in 1999. By his account, his is the only ballooning service in New England that operates full-time, seven days a week. Formerly a construction worker, Sica fell in love with ballooning the moment he took a ride in the 1990s, and quickly discovered the “untapped” market for balloon rides in New England.

“I opened up the business in ’99 and I never looked back, never swung another hammer,” Sica said. “It’s not a bad job. You get to get high every day and get paid for it.”

Sica takes thousands of visitors and locals on hour-long balloon rides every year, gently drifting over New Hampshire’s picturesque, forested landscape. Given that the state is 84 percent tree-covered, he said, and that the other 16 percent is mostly covered in homes or water, backyard landings are quite common for the 61-year-old. He said that over the last 16 years, he’s only been asked by three homeowners to leave their property.

“If you’ve got a big smiley-face hot air balloon landing in your back yard and you’re angry about that, your problems are probably bigger than a balloon landing,” Sica joked. “Thank goodness, most people love it.”

Taylor said it’s been two or three years since she saw one of Sica’s balloons in her yard, but that it was once a very common occurrence. She guessed her yard has been used as a landing site “at least 12 times.”

“Hey, what a great way to start your day, to look out and see a huge smiley face smiling at you,” she said. “And you get to meet new people, too.”

Sica always presents the landowners with a bottle of champagne, a tradition that spawns from an act by two Frenchmen, the Montgolfier brothers, who are often heralded as the first to fly a hot air balloon in the late 18th century. When the brothers landed in large fields that belonged to farmers, the landowners would often rush at them with pitchforks, according to Sica, because they were frightened by the large, flying object. The brothers would present champagne as a peace offering.

“There’s something about them,” he said, “the kind of mystique that they present…they’re just gentle giants.”

Labo and her new fiance agreed.

“It wasn’t terrifying. You would think it would be,”Brady, 48, said. “When you’re first going up it was a little scary, but after that, it was just beautiful.”

“When you’re up there,” Labo said, “it’s completely quiet and still and it’s just so peaceful.”

Blessing writes for the North Andover, Mass. Eagle-Tribune.