All our Jules Vernes are on board. The burner is activated with with a deafening roar, pumping warm air into the nylon which undulates languidly. The baloon starts to leave the ground, pointing its extravagance and its elegance up towards the sky. The ascent is surprisingly swift, without giving that impression. The hot-air baloon, now alive, finds itself once again on common ground with the heavens; the sky is its garden, the journey begins.

The ground grows distant, a zoom out which reveals a quite different perception of the landscape in which we usually find ourselves. Nature seems well organized in the fine curves and geometric shapes of cherry orchards and squares of farmland alongside the sine curves of vineyards, pockets of humanity here and there and thick clusters of pine forest. We are at 500m altitude, the hot-air baloon drifts as the wind carries it, in total silence as the burner is off. A beautiful feeling of freedom settles over us even if we have decided to give ourselfs over to the whims of Nature. Jacques uses these moments to share with us some ideas about aerology. Take-off is always early in the morning to avoid bubbles of warm air and we alway land before 11am to avoid the higher temperatures. In the evening, you have to take off when the angle of the sun has lowered. "The baloon is a bubble of hot air moving within bubbles of cold air as big as a city! When the air is at 0°C the baloon has to be heated to 70°C in order to take off! The higher the temperature, the warmer the baloon has to be, and it becomes even heavier in the air. At 140°C , the fabric burns!".