hot air balloon festival

I was invited to go to the Peoria Balloon Fest today and was excited to just get out of the house and see another part of Peoria that wasn't on the bus route. I was expecting rows of hot air balloons being tethered to the ground in all its splendor, but this is what I got instead:

This is the view from the parking lot and we were walking up to the "festival".
Here are some balloon blow up jumpy thingys. The kid I was with had a fun time jumping on those things while his parents and I were standing in the sun waiting for some adult activities to start. The kid also got dust everywhere on his body -- I was afraid how his mother was going to react with him getting into their clean car.

They had a petting zoo at the festival. This tortoise was trying really hard to get out of his metal cage. There was also a llama and a small kangaroo (aka joey). They charged $3 to "enter" the zoo, when one could easily see all the animals from outside.

Balloons! But I don't think the festival is about this kind of balloon.

For adult entertainment, there was a skydiving show. You can't see it here, but there's a skydiver somewhere in those clouds. And that's a giraffe's head.

There's the skydiver!

Finally, people setting up the hot air balloons. Apparently, there is some kind of competition to see whose balloon gets up first and flies the longest.

We kept sitting around, waiting for the balloon competition to start.

And eventually, we just left after two hours of waiting because it was "too windy" for the hot air balloon competition to start. Who knew that you had to have a non-windy day for hot air balloons to take off?