A friend and I went last night, so I wanted to post about my experience, since the festival is also going on tonight. I realize that this is a new festival for Salt River Fields, so I will try and be fair! :)
The first issue was with parking. They had all the traffic to the event coming in from the main entrance off of Pima Rd., so of course there was a pretty good back-up. I believe there was also an Arizona Fall League game going on that evening, but that did not seem to affect traffic too much. Most of the cars seemed to be heading to the balloon festival.
I wanted to make sure that you all knew that parking was free...BUT, you have to pay for admission as you enter the parking lot. The thing is...if you are going to meet someone there and use the Groupon, you'll need to make sure that person is in the car behind you. I met my friend at Target so she ended up being directly behind me in the parking line - but I'm not sure what happened to people that didn't know about this procedure and wanted to use the Groupon. And, of course, be sure to bring cash for your admission.
They were just starting to set up the balloons when we finally got in (a little before 6 p.m.). The balloons were really cool! My daughter was very excited. We then started to trick-or-treat at each hot-air balloon, which was very fun. The people with the hot air balloons were all awesome. It might be a little scary for smaller kids, since they have to fire up the burner every few minutes to keep the balloon inflated. It's actually pretty loud and hot if you're right next to the balloon.
I would highly recommend eating dinner before you go to this festival. The lines were CRAZY - and I'm guessing it will only be worse tonight. There were not nearly enough concession stands for all of the people there, and the food was incredibly expensive. $5 for a hot dog (just a regular-sized hot dog), $4 for a 16 oz. bottle of soda, and $5 for a 16 oz. plastic cup of lemonade. Wow. Definitely bring some snacks for the kiddos.
We then took the kids over to the Kids Zone. I was SO disappointed to find out that you had to pay for the inflatables separately. To be fair, I went back to their website and it does say on the "Event Info" page that the KidsZone activities were $1 and up. I missed that when I was first looking over the site. It was also a madhouse in this area. I would NOT recommend the Jurassic Park inflatable for kids under 3. It's not scary or anything - but holy cow, those little ones were getting trampled in there. I saw a couple of little girls come out sobbing because the older kids were being too crazy and they were inadvertently getting bumped around. Also, it costs $3 for this activity. There is a smaller bounce house and slide for the little ones. But, even the smaller slide costs $1 per turn. I wish they would've had a wristband option.
Finally....the website touts that there would be "over 30 Hot Air Balloon displays". Um, no, not even close. I think there were around 18 total. Although, I suppose it's possible there might be more balloons showing up tonight. And the other thing - we left around 8:15 p.m.., and they had already started to take down most of the balloons. I believe the website said they'd be taken down around 9 p.m.
If you're planning on heading out there tonight, be sure to go EARLY, and bring cash and patience with you. All in all, we did enjoy the event, but I'm really glad I had a Groupon!
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