Witto Monkey: Together We...RISE!

It's Rise Fest time!

The Rise Fest was held 30 minutes further East of Las Vegas. We did want to get there before sundown, but we lagged here and there. It always happens. Hahaha. And then the line for a pic in front of the Rise sign was long as heck and moved as slow as a sloth! Still, the sign was a great welcome piece!

After picking up our lantern kits, we made our way around to our section and picked out a spot for us to stake. The whole area had metal tiki torches that were spaced out about 5 ft apart from each other. Definitely more than enough for every group to have their own.

While Jeric held the Zoesters, Marky worked on sparking up our torch!

Success! We have fire people!

And here you have the impatient ones. There's always the one in a handful of groups that decides to not follow rules. Seriously though. Don't they know that if we all release at the same time it would be that much more glorious? Oh well. What can you do!

Here's a bunch of folks behind us working on lighting their lanterns and prepping for launch.

I wont show you the first failed one. But the first to try was Liz and Marky and sadly, the lantern fizzled out and literally burned down. Hahaha. Jeric had to straight out stomp it out. That's when we all decided to look around us to see how everyone else was doing there's and then we figured it out! Pwahaha. What rookies we are. But hey, there weren't actually any instructions mind you. And even when we figured it all out, it wasn't something that was easy. You have the lantern all folded up, so you have to have two people holding it at an angle and sticking the portion that needs to catch fire over the torch. But the thing has waaaay too much fire retardant on it that needs to burn away before the lantern actually gets lit! Then, when it's lit, you have to patiently wait for the emitted gas to pile up enough to push "air" into the lantern to make it all poofy and ready to take off. If you release your lantern too early, well, you can have it sway all weird and then the sides catch on fire. Which is what happened to Marky and Liz's. Or it will take off, but laterally, thus having a high chance of taking out someones head. Lol! Trust, we weren't the only ones struggling. There were so many.. "WATCH OUT!"s and screaming and squealing as people chased their runaway lanterns. Hoping they wouldn't burn anyone in their wake.

Anyhow, here's take 2. Marky helping Ivan light his up. Looks like success, folks!

And then it was launch time... I'll just leave you with the video, which doesn't do the experience justice.

And here we are, admiring the view.

Zoë had an absolute blast. She kept wanting to light lantern after lantern! And we had tons to release because we basically had two for every one of us! Plus, we were down 1 person. So among us 5, we had 12 lanterns! Yah, toooons.