More rain

The Monday afternoon flight was cancelled due to continuing rain. This is getting old...

After celebrating Cindy Petrehn's birthday with lunch at Denny's, we went to Mashiko (also called "Pottery Town") and did a little shopping.

There's no TV channels in English at our hotel, but somehow we just found a replay of this weekend's Cowboys/Colts game on. I wonder if there's a pizza delivery place nearby...

Time to kill

So with time to kill today, I've found some other folks at the event posting stuff online:

• Nick Donner (USA) is blogging the event here.
• Here's a photo of Joe, Nick, and Paul from the Friday morning practice flight. It was taken by Sean Kavanagh, a competitor from Australia (check out Kavanagh Balloons). His complete Flickr photo collection is available here. He's also blogging the event here.
• Another competitor from Australia, Andrew Robertson, is blogging (here) and using Flickr (here) as well.
• A few people (mostly those I've listed above) are posting photos to Flickr. To see all the "Motegi balloon" photos, click here. You'll see a little of the countryside, the briefing tent, and the various "racer" balloons made by the manufacturer's all over the world. Almost everyone has a preference (I love my Cameron ZL-65), but I think they're all pretty cool.

I'm sure there are more, but this is all I've found so far.

I'd certainly rather be working than sitting in the lobby surfing, but hopefully there will be plenty of flying yet this week. Everyone is still asleep in my room though, so I guess poking around online is okay for now.

It's official - flight cancelled

Our morning flight has officially been cancelled. This evening doesn't look good either. Not sure what we're going to do with ourselves all day. We had the evening off last night, and even though there's lots to see and do in the area, most of us came here to race balloons, so it's hard (and somewhat counter-productive) to "shift gears" back into tourist mode.

There were actually some teams at the briefing last night that were asking if the event director would consider a more broad cancellation. They wanted him to scrub both the morning and evening flights at the same time so they could better plan their non-ballooning activities for the day. Fortunately, his answer was something to the effect of "Last time I checked, there was a World Championship going on, so I don't think we'll do that."

Not looking good

It's 4:50am (about 1:10 before the briefing is scheduled to start) and the weather is not looking good. It's raining pretty hard out right now. They do recalls and cancellations with pagers here. Every pilot and observer has one, so they just send them a specific page if the flight is cancelled. They said any pages this morning would come between 5:00am and 5:15am, so we should know soon. I have yet to find a good aviation weather resource for Japan, but The Weather Channel has the chance of rain for the area at 100% all day.