Episode Report Card Miss Alli: C- | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT In my beautiful (and slow) balloon
By Miss Alli | Season 8 | Episode 9 | Aired on 11.28.2005
The Linzes' balloon finishes inflating, and they take off. One of the Tonyas looks up at the departing balloon and says, "I love Bone. He kills me." It's not every day you get to see a nice young woman on television saying, "I love Bone," so that's nice. The Bransens take off next. The Godlewskis follow, noting that Rolly is getting dragged across the ground by the Weavers' balloon and...kind of not caring that much. I find I don't care either. I mean, I wouldn't want his arm yanked out of the socket or anything, but run-of-the-mill dragging, I'm not losing any sleep over. The Weavers leave last.
The balloons float at a breakneck pace across the landscape. The Linzes notice the Bransens approaching. "This is the Bransen ladies," Nick observes. And then he looks right in the camera and says, "And their dad," in this way that is so mischievously funny that I kind of like him a little bit. Oh, shut up. He also notes that the Bransens are floating in the Linzes' general direction. "Ramming speed," he notes with a little bit of bitter disgust. Yeah, this is not what Nick had in mind for racing, you can sort of tell. He was envisioning more screeching taxis and less...of this. The two balloons actually do eventually touch each other, but they float on by harmlessly after the slowest collision since the one hundredth replay of Lawrence Taylor breaking Joe Theismann's leg. "Bounced off of 'em, he's really lucky," says the Weavers' pilot, creating drama as hard as he can. The Weavers pretend they're glad nobody got hurt.
"I'm not really wild about heights," Michelle observes while far, far off the ground. "The Amazing Race has cured me," she goes on to note with more than a little bit of "yeah, rah rah, shut up" in her voice. Elsewhere, Rolly tells us that he once had a dream that he fell out of a hot-air balloon, so he's a little nervous and would specifically like to know who made the basket in the balloon. I think the pilot should have told him it was some very nice Wiccans. Or even some of the local Mormons. I would have enjoyed that.
Balloons drift suspensefully. All this floating! What will happen?
The Linzes' pilot lands them right on the side of a hill and gives them their next clue. It tells them to head back to Heber City to the Heber Valley Railway. Phil explains that this is a towering 14-mile journey back to...where they've already been. I hope they can take the pressure. The Bransens land next and are sent on their way. Meanwhile, the Linzes talk about how cool the ride in the balloon was. I'm sure the Weavers wish that they had been able to take their balloon ride in an area on which God spent adequate time, unlike the state of Utah.