My Wife and I did the balloon ride with Orange Blossom Balloons in 2005 and thought it was excellent, well worth the money.

It was an early start (5.30am I think) which was doubly hard as we had been stuck in a traffic jam coming back from Tampa Bay baseball the previous night, so only ended up having about 4hrs sleep!!

They pick up from the La Quinta Lakeside on 192 (I think it has changed hands now) and basically you get going quite quickly. You help with the set up etc so you really feel part of the operation and then the flight itself is amazing just as dawn breaks...very peaceful and very hot if you are tall like me!!!

We actually landed on a barbed wire fence which obviously wasn't planned but there was no damage done. The pilots are great, really funny and of course you get a certificate signed by them later on.

After helping pack away, its champagne all round until heading off back to the hotel for an all you can eat buffet breakfast which was much better than I expected.

You can of course then purchase photographs, t-shirts etc to commemorate the day.

All in all well worth it. There are plenty of operators doing it but I would certainly recommend Orange Blossom.

Julian

p.s. Don't the let the fact they don't fly over Disney put you off, nobody is allowed to even though I have seen it advertisted on some websites.

Thanks for the info, it sounds really good and will possibly give it a go. When you done it were there many children on the flights and how many people in each basket.

There were a few children if I remember rightly.

Basically there were 3 balloons, one was huge and carried I would guess about 12 people. The other 2 were smaller and in ours I think there were six of us.

Its a great experience, well worth the money.

sounds like it would make a great special birthday/anniversary present.

Thumbs up for the nice breakfast too-that's more than you get with the UK ones.

Don't they do things so well over there!

was thinking of one of these while in orlando in october.anyone done this or know of anybody that has?too many things to cram into a fortnight don't know where to start.2 ads and 3 kids 10,13,and 16 to keep happy.any suggestions welcome. cheers Angie