Today a couple of us got up early and watched some of the other competitors fly a practice flight. They started from outside the competition center, which I believe is a gymnasium for the local university. In the red balloon below is German pilot David Strasmann, who is
updating a blog regularly himself.
We followed them for awhile and came across a Hungarian real estate opportunity:
After that we wired the radios, inverters, and GPS's into our
Ford Transit van:
Tonight we're planning to fly, and the weather looks good. A
digital copy of the map was finally posted (paper copies aren't ready yet), so we've now got the navigation computers for both the balloon and the vehicle up-and-running. We verified this morning that's it's pretty wet and muddy in spots. Some of the roads here are little more than tractor paths, but it's impossible to see that on a map.
