I rode in the Goodyear blimp over Coachella
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If you’d like to take a ride on the Goodyear blimp, it turns out you can’t do it wearing heels.
This I learned on Day 2 of Coachella, when the people who promote the tire company’s famous dirigible — they have a nice lady in charge of the blimp’s socials and everything — invited me and my colleagues Rebecca Castillo and Kayla Bartkowski to climb on board for a little cruise over the desert festival.
Before we could get on to the airship that had room for about six to eight people, we had to watch a safety video in which the narrator told us that you can’t wear heels on the blimp — but that if you’d worn them today, you could check with a Goodyear representative and they’d see about other arrangements. (One rep told me she’d already loaned out her sneakers several times Saturday.)
Anyway!
The ride was gentler than I’d anticipated — kind of like a boat ride in a harbor. We took off from a giant dirt field at the Jacqueline Cochran Regional Airport in Thermal and tooled around for 30 minutes or so; when we got over Coachella, we could see a few hundred Beliebers camped out as close to the main stage as they could get — nine or 10 hours before Bieber’s performance was scheduled to begin.
They looked so little down there — so small in size, so big in Beliebf.
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Back on the ground, we had to get off the blimp two by two, each duo replaced by a new pair of folks who’d responded to an email asking if they might want to a ride on a humongous floating billboard.
The ladies who replaced Rebecca and Kayla looked super jazzed; my guy seemed less impressed.
Maybe he’d blimped before.
